


as a ship to harbor

by alethiometry



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, F/M, Gaslighting, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Alternating, Physical Abuse, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-09-21 12:55:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethiometry/pseuds/alethiometry
Summary: Lowering their weapons and coming down off Mount Taygetos together, they’re both beginning to realize, was the easiest part of it all. It’s what comes after—the slow, shaky process of learning simply how tobearound one another—that feels like fighting a whole new war.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译！】as a ship to harbor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20025316) by [dolly7151](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dolly7151/pseuds/dolly7151)



> I originally wrote this intending for it to be a standalone little drabble following the end of the family storyline, and it somehow accidentally spiraled into... a whole thing. I'll try to update as often as I can!
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: spoilers for the family storyline, including references to canonical character deaths.

**i.**

 

“Alexios.”

Her brother does not reply.

“Alexios!”

Still nothing. Kassandra rolls her eyes and rises from the thin bedroll she’s unfurled for herself on the floor of the old family house. From the room where she used to sleep, once upon a time, Stentor snores like a fucking boar in heat. She searches the kitchen for something to drink, but between the five of them they’d made quick work of all the wine in the house. Sighing, she grabs the lone loaf of bread leftover from what must have been the most uncomfortable family dinner ever beheld by the gods.

Still, she’s kept worse company. They all have.

“I know you’re awake, Alexios,” she hisses, and flicks a piece of bread. It bounces off the back of his head and finally he sits up, scowling.

“What do you want?” he growls.

“If I stay in here any longer,” she whispers. “I just might run my spear through Stentor’s throat.”

“Great. Do it.”

Kassandra snorts. “Maybe later. Come outside with me, won’t you? I have questions for you.”

“Of course you do,” he grumbles, but follows her anyway.

It had rained earlier in the day, but now the clouds have parted to reveal a brilliant, golden harvest moon as large and round as any _drachma_ she’s ever pocketed. She finds a dry patch to sit on by the edge of the terrace overlooking lower Sparta, distant braziers illuminating the statued colonnades that run up the main boulevard into the city. Above the rooftops and the Lakonian valley looms Mount Taygetos, formidable and capped in snow—and above that, a magnificent tapestry of jewel-bright stars.

She tears the bread loaf in two and tosses one half to Alexios, who settles down beside her. It’s strange to see him without his armor; though they are of nearly equal height, he seems much smaller now, and so very vulnerable. In the moonlight she can see countless scars both thin and thick, running up and down and across his bare arms and disappearing beneath his _chiton_ : twenty-odd years of hard-fought battles mapping out a history of strife and struggle across his skin.

 _Perhaps we’re not so different, you and I_ , she thinks, running a finger over her own scars.

Ikaros lands on her knee, smacking Alexios in the head with one wing before pecking primly at the loaf in Kassandra’s hands.

“Your pet chicken doesn’t like me very much,” Alexios mutters.

She snorts, tearing off little chunks of bread to hand-feed to Ikaros, who keeps one beady eye trained on her brother. “Do you think it might have something to do with you calling him a chicken?”

“He hit me first.”

Kassandra chuckles. Up close, she can see that the shadows under her brother’s eyes have lightened ever so slightly in the few days since they walked off Taygetos together, though she guesses it will be a long time before they fade completely. If they ever do.

 _I met a soldier as haunted as your brother, once, when I was still a young apprentice,_ Hippokrates had told her just this morning, as they attended the funeral procession for Brasidas. _He survived the war with Persia, but something changed in him when he returned home. He killed his mother and father in a sudden fit of rage, and would have opened his wife’s throat as well, had his neighbors not subdued him in time. The worst part of it was, he remembered it all. Every terrible thing he’d done was fresh in his memory, even after the fog of madness lifted._

 _What did they do to you, little brother?_ Kassandra wonders.

“You were born in winter,” she tells him instead. “Did you know that?”

Alexios raises an eyebrow. “That’s what you dragged me out here to ask?”

Kassandra ignores him and continues, “They took you from us in the summer, during the stormy season. But before that, I spent every evening out here with you, right where we’re sitting now. _Mater_ used to tell me stories of the great heroes in the stars, so when the spring came, I would bring you out here and tell them to you.”

“I know,” Alexios says quietly. “Your spear—when you handed it to me, on the mountain, I saw you. Holding me. Talking to me. Playing with me.” He blinks. Once, twice. Swallows, looking down, then meets her eyes, and suddenly it strikes her how very _young_ he is. _He looks so tired_ , Kassandra thinks, but says nothing.

_The best thing for your brother’s recovery—as it was for that poor soldier—is not to feed him drugs, or to make sacrifices to the gods. He is in his right mind again, and simply needs space to heal on his own. Be there for him, Kassandra, but allow him room to breathe._

“I didn’t want to touch the spear,” Alexios continues, “but it called to me, and I couldn’t resist. Like the Artifact in our—in their—in the cave below Delphi. You knew that, didn’t you? You knew it would make me see those things.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Kassandra tells him. “But I hoped it might show you that I never meant any harm.”

Her brother sighs. “It showed me that they hurt me. Stole me away. Beat me, burned me. Poisoned my mind with lies, and used me to suit their needs. And then it showed me that you loved me.”

“I still do, Alexios. You know that, don’t you?”

“I…” he trails off, looking away again. Up where Taygetos looms. “I don’t know what I know anymore. That’s the truth.”

Kassandra nods, her heart sinking even as she reminds herself that it has only been a few days since they came off the mountain together; it will take far longer than that to mend everything that is broken. Still, it stings like a slap in the face, every time these scars the Cult left on her brother’s soul manifest themselves. There are just so many.

 _Room to breathe_ , she remembers.

Ikaros nips at the top of her head, and she breaks off a few more crumbs from her loaf to feed to him. “Careful,” she warns. “You’re going to get fat if you eat too much of this bread. You don’t want to _actually_ turn into a big, plump chicken, do you?”

Ikaros squawks in protest. Then, as if to demonstrate just how un-chicken-like he is, he spreads his wings wide and takes off, swooping through the air in great arcs, up and away, silhouetted against the glittering stars.

“ _Malákes_ showoff,” Kassandra mutters. Alexios snorts, and for the first time in so very, very long, Kassandra sees a genuine smile brighten her brother’s face.

They lapse into a comfortable silence. Ikaros returns, this time eyeing Alexios with more interest than suspicion. Kassandra ruffles his feathers affectionately, reluctant to shatter the quiet with the questions that have been on her mind for days—the answers she’s terrified to hear.

She sees Alexios see her check for the dagger she keeps tucked under her tunic. Sees him tense, ever so slightly, nostrils flared, watching her every move from the corner of his eye like an animal caged, and hates herself for seeking out the ugly truths that may yet tear apart this new, still-fragile peace between them.

“Tell me about the night Perikles died,” she says.

Her brother’s eyes immediately narrow in suspicion, but there’s something else there, too, and it takes her a moment to recognize it for what it is: shame. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Tell me everything you did that night.”

He drops his gaze, knuckles white and vice-like on his uneaten bread. “My orders from Kleon were simple. Wait for Perikles to arrive at the Parthenon, as he inevitably would, then lure you there, too. I was to kill him, then capture you.”

Kassandra raises an eyebrow. “But you barely gave me a second glance.”

“I didn’t see the point,” Alexios replies with a shrug. “I looked you in the eye that night, and I saw that what I’d become terrified you, and I thought that that was enough. To show you that your brother was gone—that Deimos killed him, too. And Kleon beat me for it. Harshly. He wanted you alive. If he had you—if he could make you the Cult’s new Champion—then he could dispose of me without any backlash from the rest of them.”

“You told me, that first time we truly spoke,” she says, “it’s all politics to them. That’s all it’s ever been, really. Even the ones who claim to worship our family line: we’re all just pawns.”

He nods. “I think I’ve always known that, or at least suspected. That a day would come when they, too, would throw me away. I didn’t want to believe it. But as long as you were still out there, I would never be safe. So the next time I saw you, at Pylos—”

“—You tried to kill me.”

Another nod. Kassandra sighs, aching deeply.

“But that was all you did in Athens?” she asks. “Wait in the Parthenon for Perikles?”

“Yes.”

“So you didn’t—There was a little girl, that same night. In the Odeon of Perikles. You didn’t kill her, or have her killed?”

“Would you kill me if I had?” There’s no fear in her brother’s voice. Only curiosity, and perhaps resignation.

“I don’t know,” she says, and she can’t tell if he looks relieved or disappointed.

“Who was she to you?” he asks.

“Her name was Phoibe,” she tells him. “She was the only true friend I had on Kephallonia. She always dreamed of going on some grand adventure, so after I left to kill Nikolaos for Elpenor she stowed away on a ship bound for Athens and came under Aspasia’s care.”

“You loved her.”

It’s not a question, but a statement.

Kassandra nods. “She was clever, and sweet, and she made me laugh. She looked up to me, and I let her die alone. There were four Cultist guards standing over her body when I found her. _Four!_ Who sends four grown men to murder a little girl?”

“It wasn’t me, Kassandra.”

She searches his eyes long and hard for any sign of deceit. Finding none, she finally lets out a long, shuddering sigh and swipes at the wetness on her cheeks. So it was the Delian Cultists, then, who murdered Phoibe, and only the gods knew why. Part of her regrets that she’s already wiped out their line. If she could do it again, she’d do it even slower. Carve her rage into their flesh and bleed them dry, one by one; whisper Phoibe’s name into their ears as they die, the echoes of her vengeance haunting them all the way down to Tartarus.

Kleon’s drowned face swims into her mind’s eye, vacant and bloated with seawater.

“I killed Kleon,” she says softly.

“I figured,” says Alexios. “When I came to after the battle, I tore the arrow from my back and saw by its fletching that it came from his quiver. I made my way down to the beach and found his body where you left it. Vultures were already stripping the flesh from his bones.” He shoots her a tentative grin. “His carcass stank to high Hades, if that makes you feel better.”

“He suffered before he died,” Kassandra says. “I made sure of it. I watched him twitch his life away beneath my foot, and I wanted it to feel like a victory.”

“Did it?”

“For a moment. I wanted to make him to suffer the way he made you suffer—made _us_ suffer. But the moment his suffering ceased for good, I just felt empty again. Killing him didn’t heal the arrow-wound in your back. It didn’t bring Phoibe back to life, or Brasidas—the Spartan general from Amphipolis,” she clarifies.

“The one they buried today.” Alexios’ voice is rough and weary. “He was your friend. And I killed him.”

“He was a good man, Alexios,” she tells him. “Spartan soldiers are raised from boyhood to be hard and cruel, but he was neither. He saw the good in people, where others saw only darkness. He believed in redemption, where others called for damnation. He would have seen a light in you, too, if only I’d taken the time to explain to him who you were to me.”

Her brother bursts into laughter then—a hollow, bitter sound that makes her cold all over. “What makes you so certain I was worth saving?” he sneers, suddenly Deimos again. “Who gave you the right to decide that for me? _I_ certainly didn’t.”

“You know what? You’re right,” Kassandra snaps, anger flaring so suddenly that even she herself is taken aback by it. “For all I know, you could be playing me like a fucking lute. Getting close to me, to _mater_ and Nikolaos and even fucking Stentor, so you can slit our throats in our sleep. For all I know, I did you a favor, ridding you of all the Cultists who ever crossed you or sought to replace you with a new Champion. Fuck me for being so naive, is that it?”

A spark of Deimos’ wrath flashes in her brother’s eyes before he looks away, jaw clenched tight. In the split second before he turns, though, she sees glimpses of other things etched deep into the lines of his face. Guilt. Shame.

Despair.

 _The maddened soldier took his own life not long after I saw him_ , Hippokrates had told her. _But I don’t think your brother will suffer the same fate._

 _How can you be sure of that?_ Kassandra had asked.

_Because he has you._

“I trust you, Alexios,” Kassandra tries, gentler this time. She places a hand on his shoulder but isn’t surprised when he shrugs her off. _Give him space._ “I do. A good man died in Amphipolis, but his goodness lives on in me, and I know it’s buried somewhere inside you, too. When a snake bites you, you don’t just lie down and resign yourself to suffering a slow and painful death. You tie off the wound and drain out the venom to let yourself heal. _That’s_ how we fight this darkness. That’s how we win.”

She rises to her feet and Ikaros takes to the air. Her brother turns to look at her but says nothing, his face impassive.

“My ship leaves Lakonia in two days,” she tells him. “I have Cultists to hunt, still, and there are always people to help. There are answers to questions I have that can only be found in faraway corners of the Aegean, and I intend to seek those out as well. There is a place for you on my crew, Alexios, but only if that’s what you want. You’re a free man now. The choice is yours.”

The trek down to Gytheion is long and lonely. She keeps alert for any sign that Alexios is following her, but hears nothing. Sees nothing. Perhaps it was a mistake, she thinks, leaving him there outside the home that hasn’t felt like home in twenty years, and perhaps never will. But forcing him into anything he doesn’t want for himself would make her no better than the Cult.

 _But am I giving him room to breathe,_ she wonders, _or have I simply abandoned him, just like everybody else?_

She spends a long, sleepless night on the roof of the Gytheion tavern, searching for stories in the stars.

Barnabas comes to her in the morning with rumors of Cultist activity on Kythera Island. Been going on for years and years, or so he’s heard, but no one’s ever done a damned thing about it; whoever it is, they’ve tied themselves inextricably to a community that is at best oblivious and at worst complacent.

Kassandra smirks. “Pausanias and Kleon thought themselves indispensable, too.”

“We’re all dispensable to the gods,” Barnabas replies good-naturedly.

“Doesn’t that frustrate you?”

He shrugs. “It makes life interesting, at least. In any case, it’ll be good to take to the seas again.”

Kassandra sends a messenger boy to let Myrrine know—and Alexios, too, if he’s still there—that she means to depart soon, slipping a small pouch of _drachmae_ into the eager child’s hand.

The child returns in the afternoon with her mother in tow, what looks like three days’ worth of food tucked beneath his skinny arms. “Off you go to your sisters, now—and be sure you share that food with them!” Myrrine calls. The child takes off running through the streets with a hasty but jubilant thank-you.

“I must admit, I find myself envying you,” Myrrine tells Kassandra later that evening. The crew have retired to the tavern once again, a final night of respite before their departure in the morning. The two of them stand at the bow of the docked _Adrestia_ , passing a wineskin back and forth, watching moonlight reflect off the calm waters. “I am a Spartan citizen once more, but part of my heart will always reside in the kingdom of Poseidon.”

“You could come with me,” Kassandra says. She swirls the wineskin before tilting it back, savoring the richness of the good wine—far superior to all the swill she’s ever sampled for a wheedling Markos. “I’ve met some former colleagues of yours, you know. I’m sure they would be thrilled to see you sail under the colors of Keos again.”

Myrrine smiles. “I have matters that need attending to here,” she says. “But perhaps another time.”

“What of you and Nikolaos?” Kassandra asks.

“I think some part of my heart still belongs to him, too,” her mother admits, “but there are some betrayals that cut too deep. He knows this, and has made his peace with it. I care for him, truly, but I couldn’t tell you what the future holds for us.”

“He is a far better stepfather to Stentor than he ever was to Alexios and me,” Kassandra says. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“Nor I,” says Myrrine.

“I thought Alexios might join me,” Kassandra confesses. “I—I think I pushed him away again. I didn’t mean to. There is goodness in him, _mater_ , I know there is. But it’s buried so deep, and I don’t know how to dig it out without hurting him.”

But where she expects Myrrine to share in her guilt, or to reproach her for her foolhardiness, her mother simply smiles, reaching up to brush away a stray lock of Kassandra’s hair. “Your brother is stronger than you give him credit for. Just today I saw him exploring Sparta, stopping by the _agora_ to observe the farmers and shepherds selling their produce, the _perioikoi_ crafting their wares. He is curious about the world that was denied to him for so long—and to everybody out there he is just another traveler passing through the city. Gilded armor or no, he’s not Deimos anymore. You can rest easy, lamb. He’ll be alright.”

 _You didn’t see the scars on his arms,_ Kassandra wants to tell her, _some so old that they must have been inflicted when he was but a small child—younger than I was, even, that night_ pater _threw us both away. You didn’t see the thicker, roped scars when the nighttime breeze blew through his tunic and I caught a glimpse of the mess of burns and slashes across his back. You didn’t see the shame and doubt in his eyes when I told him I still loved him, or hear the despair in his hollow laughter when I tried to convince him that he was worth saving._

But it would do no good at all to tell her mother these things, and so Kassandra stays quiet. Presently, Myrrine leaves to find somewhere to board for the night, and Kassandra stretches out on the deck for another night of fitful sleep.

She wakes shivering in the pre-dawn mist creeping in from the open sea. She wakes to a rustle of leather and a creak of wood underfoot as a mist-shrouded figure prowls the _Adrestia_ ’s deck. She wakes, alert at once, darting forward silently, half-spear drawn—only to falter as an all-too-familiar sword rises to parry her slash.

Alexios meets her eyes, a statement and a question all in one.

_I am here, like you asked._

_Will you still have me?_

She nods, just once, and lowers her half-spear with a grin.

_Of course._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays for everyone who celebrates things towards the end of December! I just wanted to say that I am completely overwhelmed with how kind and encouraging all your comments/kudos have been. This is my first multi-chapter fic and also shaping up to be the longest thing I've ever written, and I am having so much fun writing it, so I'm very happy and relieved that y'all seem to be enjoying it too!
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Canon-level violence. Spoilers for a couple Cultists whose reveals aren't a part of the family storyline. Also spoilers for the family storyline, of course, but at this point that kind of goes without saying.

His sister is a great many things—shrewd, fiercely protective, a formidable foe in battle, and so very, very stubborn—but when it comes to laying out strategies that involve more than one moving part (in other words: herself), he has to laugh in her face. Which is rich, he knows, coming from him, but if _he_ thinks her stab-first-ask-questions-later approach is woefully misguided here, then that is really saying something.

“Something you want to share, Alexios?” she asks him, glaring.

He is acutely aware that it is not just his sister’s eyes, but also the eyes of her entire crew— _her other family_ , his unhelpful mind supplies—that are trained on him. His smirk only broadens.

“It’s a terrible plan,” he says. “You want to, what, rub shoulders with the locals until by chance you get a good lead on somebody who’s been living among them undetected for years? How many Cultists have you taken out in the past year? Five? Six?”

“Nine, actually,” she snaps. “Ten, if we’re counting you as well.”

“Exactly,” he says. “They’re all onto you at this point. There’s not a single Cultist remaining who isn’t aware that you’re coming for them, which means even the most remote ones will have learned by now to recognize your ship on sight. What do you think they’ll do the moment they hear that a great warship flying those colors—” he jabs a finger at the sails, as yet unfurled while they sit, still, in Gytheion harbor, “—has made landfall? You think they’ll wait patiently for you to knock on their door? Invite you in for a bit of wine and a snack of figs before they let you kill them?”

He draws his sword, and one of the old men his sister for some reason likes to keep around—the loud one with the glass eye—jump ups, alarmed, only for her to place a warning hand on his shoulder. Ignoring the old man, he taps the tip of his sword against the painted map on the _Adrestia_ ’s quarterdeck, at the cluster of islands east of the Peloponnese.

“One of the Aegean branch Cultists makes his rounds here, by the Obsidian Islands. He’s sold his services to the Athenian navy, as they plan to take the islands back from Spartan control,” he tells them. “Kill him in battle, and I’ll take his ship with a skeleton crew, sail it to Kythera, and deal with the Cultist myself. No one will see it coming.”

His sister looks like she’s about to protest, but then another of the old men, the quiet Athenian with the blue shawl, nods. “It’s not a bad plan, actually,” he says. “We’ve got a man on the inside now, so to speak. We should use that to our advantage.”

“The one you’re looking for is named Diona,” he tells his sister. “I know her well. She’s…” he pauses, searching for the right word. “Duplicitous.”

His sister lifts her chin and stares at him haughtily. “I’ve dealt with duplicitous Cultists before, Alexios. I shouldn’t need to remind you that I sent every last one of them to Hades.”

“And I’ve seen Diona work her charms on mercenaries stronger and more experienced than you,” he snaps, “and bend them completely to her will. She made Elpenor look like a misbehaving child. Even Kleon was wary of her. Oh, and there’s also the fact that my way relies far less on variables outside of your control. I know Diona, and she knows me. That gives me an opening that you could never fabricate for yourself, no matter how long you spend cozying up to the people of Kythera.”

If someone ever figured out how to weaponize facial expressions, he thinks absently, they’d do well to produce his sister’s glare in mass quantities. Surely it would put a hasty end to this fucking war. Nonetheless, he glares right back.

 _You said you trusted me,_ he thinks, but does not dare say it aloud, because even in his mind it sounds petulant. _Was that a lie?_

“ _Maláka!_ ” His sister throws her hands up in exasperation. For a moment he thinks the matter is settled—and then she does something truly strange.

She calls the crew together for a vote.

“What the fuck,” he asks her quietly, after they’ve both made their cases and the crew are mulling their choices, “are you doing?”

“Sailing into open battle seems like it should be a decision made by the entire crew,” she replies.

“And you do this every time you sail?”

“Not at all,” she says. “But you challenged me directly, which is something that rarely happens, so I thought this was the most fair way to settle the argument.”

She laughs when he tells her she’s spent too much time in Athens, but when the vote is called and his idea wins out, all the mirth vanishes from her face. She shoves past him brusquely as she takes her position at the helm, bidding the loud, one-eyed man to chart a course for Melos straightaway.

It takes the rest of the day and most of the following one to reach the island, during which he makes himself useful by staying out of everybody’s way. The oarsmen sing shanties he doesn’t know, while the riggers signal to one another using a shorthand only they seem to understand. His sister stands at the helm, conversing with the lieutenants and her two constant companions, breaking off every now and again to give orders as needed. It’s all beautifully efficient in a way even he has to appreciate. Everyone has a place, a role to play.

Except for him.

The crew don’t pay him much attention, save for the occasional glances that linger half a second too long. That’s to be expected, he supposes; some of them have worked for his sister since before she started hunting the Cult. Before he met her again, or perhaps for the first time, in the cave below Delphi all those years ago. He wonders what she’s told them of him, if she’s even said anything at all; for all her professed openness towards him, he knows there are certain matters she harbors close to her heart.

His sister’s first lieutenant—the dark-haired archer woman—glances at him, but drops her gaze when he stares right back. She says something to his sister, but their backs are turned from him and he cannot read their lips.

He looks away, watching the water churn beneath the oars.

He is not privy to the conversation his sister has with the commander of the Spartan fleet once they arrive (not that he particularly cares to be), but from what he understands, it goes something like this:

The Spartan navy is, to put things kindly, a fucking mess.

His sister commands one of the fiercest crews in all of the Aegean.

Should they win the day for Sparta, they can more or less name their price for a job well done, and have first choosing of any spoils of battle: _drachmae_ , gems, weapons, armor.

Enemy ships.

Incredible, he thinks, how you can drape a vessel in red or blue, and suddenly the world forgets that you’re all just pirates awaiting a watery grave.

The crew makes camp with the Spartans that evening, but he stays with the _Adrestia_ where it’s docked in the bay, doing what he can to keep his hands busy: cleaning his armor, checking it for scratches and dents, sharpening his sword. The night before battle is always the most tedious; his mind does not do well at rest. He wants to be in the thick of it already, blind to everything but the arc of his blade, the deafening chaos around him a soothing balm. He doesn’t have to be Deimos of the Cult of Kosmos, or Alexios of Sparta, or anything else that people choose to call him; all he has to do is swing his sword, and the rest will fall into place. But the waiting, the anticipation—it wears at him, like a million little fingernails scratching at his brain, and he hates it. With every fiber of his being, he hates it.

 _Use that hatred,_ says the voice of Exekias in his mind, an echo of one of his countless training sessions over the years. _Let it drive you in battle, like a man wandering a great, arid desert, and let the blood you draw be the only thing to slake your thirst. Only the hatred. Only the blood._

 _Oh, I’ll show you fucking hatred_ , he thinks. _I'll show you all._

His sister joins him as he finishes with his armor and starts sharpening his sword. He looks up at her briefly, then returns his attention to his whetstone and the sweeping, rhythmic grind of iron on stone. She takes a seat next to him, feet dangling over the water, and offers him a bowl of boar’s blood stew.

“I don’t like boar,” he tells her when she sets it down beside him, less because he doesn’t want to eat it—although it truly does look fucking disgusting—and more to see how she’ll react. Not that she needs to know that.

“Then go find your own fucking food,” she snaps.

“Are you angry with me,” he asks, “because my strategy was better than yours? Because your crew sided with me and undermined your authority? Or are you angry because you think I’m going to betray every last one of you the moment we enter battle tomorrow?”

His sister scoffs. “You think they sided with you because they thought you had the better plan? You’re smarter than that, Alexios. They sided with you because your plan puts yourself in the most danger. Even Barnabas and Herodotos fear you’ll sell us out to the Cult, but at least your way gives you a higher chance of getting yourself killed before it happens. _That’s_ why they cast their vote the way they did.”

“And you’re their commander,” he points out. Checking the sharpness of the edge against the pad of his thumb, he wipes his blade off on his waistband before starting on the other side. “They respect you; you could order them however you please. And yet you let them make this decision, knowing full well why they did it, and you did nothing to stop them. Why?”

“Because your way _is_ the better strategy,” she says. “And because I know you won’t betray us. You don’t need to prove yourself to me, but you do need to prove yourself to my crew. I thought this might be the best way to do it.”

“So why _are_ you angry with me?”

“Because I don’t like the idea of putting you in unnecessary danger,” she replies, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

He laughs so hard he drops his whetstone. It clatters onto the deck but he manages to catch it before it falls into the sea.

“I’ve been in _unnecessary danger_ my entire life,” he says. “I know what I’m doing.”

“I know that,” she snaps. “I never said it was a _rational_ anger.”

“And how do your new allies feel about sailing into battle alongside the man who killed Brasidas of Sparta?”

For a moment, he thinks he sees something dark flicker through his sister’s eyes, but it could just as likely be a trick of the fading light.

“Brasidas of Sparta died in the heat of battle,” she says flatly, her gaze fixed on the dim horizon. “I was there. It was chaos. Who’s to say who it was that dealt the killing blow?”

He stares at her, uncomprehending. “How can you claim to want to honor your friend’s memory, yet lie about his death to his own people?”

“Because,” she responds, still in that odd, flat voice, a great thundercloud now building behind her eyes, “more nights than not, when I close my eyes, I’m right back there on that beach. I watch it happen all over again, and I’m powerless to stop it. You have no idea what I lost that day, Alexios, but I refuse to let the dead dictate my actions. Brasidas is gone, but you’re still here. You’re still my brother. I don’t see any other way forward but this.”

He thinks back to just the other night: to the long, tense dinner with the father who threw them both away, the stepbrother who would looked as if he would sooner cut out his own tongue than call himself their kin. The clipped, too-polite way their mother carried the dinner-table conversation. The conversation that turned, as it inevitably would on the day of his burial, to reminiscence of Sparta’s newest war hero. The man he murdered.

And how eager his sister had been to go outside, after everybody else had retired to bed—how earnestly she wanted simply to talk, long into the night: of starlit evenings and broken spears, of lives lost and cruelly taken, blood on both their weary hands after so long away from a home that doesn’t feel like home.

It would seem that he is not alone in seeing ghosts in his dreams, and he wonders if hers, too, sometimes don black robes, leering at her behind the grimaces of blood-painted theater masks. Or if all she ever sees is a monster wearing her brother’s face, tearing time and time again into a man whose ghost clings to her still, unshakable, like smoke from an extinguished fire.

It is a burden on her shoulders, he thinks, that she is bearing alone. To whatever extent she claims she can handle it, holding it close as if it were a treasure and not a wound, he sees how it wears on her. And he was the one who put it there.

There’s a sickly, twisting feeling in his stomach, and he can’t tell if it’s coming from the stew or from something else entirely. But he forces himself to drink it anyway, cold and greasy as it is.

“Tastes better than I thought,” he lies.

His sister rolls her eyes. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Fine. It tastes like shit.”

“It tastes like the man who made it ran it through a goat’s asshole to warm up before serving,” she says. The corner of her mouth twitches upward in a grin—just for a second, but he sees it, and it emboldens him.

“You know the taste well, sister?” he asks before he can stop himself.

“Not much else to do, growing up on Kephallonia,” she replies without missing a beat.

“Now you see,” he says drily, “the Cult doesn’t seem half as bad by comparison, does it?”

His sister looks at him, one eyebrow arched—and then starts to laugh, heartily and with her head tossed back, and it’s like the invisible weight from her shoulders has simply vanished. He can’t help laughing, too, and slowly that twisting knot inside him begins to loosen.

“Did you ever think that one day you’d end up here?” She stretches out onto her back, craning her neck to shoot him the crooked grin that he has, in just these few days, come to associate with… something he can’t quite put words to, but whatever it is, it creates a strange tugging sensation in his chest and warms him from the inside.

“Discussing the taste of goats’ assholes with my long-lost sister on the eve of a naval battle for control over the Obsidian Islands?” he drawls. “Always knew it would happen sooner or later.”

She kicks him.

Murmured, merry voices drift over from the Spartan campground, some chattering, some sparring, some singing old drinking songs. Somebody has found a lyre and is plucking it tunelessly, to the very loud amusement and consternation of his companions. The cooking fire crackles, but its heat doesn’t quite reach all the way out here, in the calm waters of the bay where the air is clear and cool, soft little breeze-formed waves lapping at the _Adrestia_ ’s hull.

He turns his attention skyward, to the scattered stars above. Strange, he thinks. He’s found himself drawn to the night sky for as long as he can remember, wishing that the blackness there, in those dark, quiet spaces between the stars, would swallow him entirely into its cradle of nothing. But now he looks at the stars themselves for what might be the first time since he was a baby, and simply wonders what stories they hold. Wonders if his sister would tell them to him again, if he asked.

“Alexios,” she says softly, as if she’s somehow read his thoughts. She props herself up on an elbow to look him in the eye. “I’m glad you’re here.”

He opens his mouth to respond, but finds the words caught in his throat. So he simply nods, and hopes that that can convey the magnitude of whatever it is that he feels, but cannot ever seem to articulate.

 

———

 

Everything, he realizes when his sister shakes him awake at dawn, is wrong.

It starts with the very fact that she had to wake him at all. He’s not supposed to sleep, the night before a battle. He’s supposed to lie awake, staring deep into the black canopy of sky, and let his rage and hatred fester within him. He’s supposed to welcome the pain, incubate it and nurse it like a mother nurtures her young. Feel it grow, and grow and grow and grow, until it consumes his entire being, and only then can he let it burst forth, fuel to the fire he carves through the heat of battle.

A soldier who does not wield his hatred like a weapon is doomed to defeat. A man who does not embrace the pain of living is simply a corpse awaiting a hasty grave.

He stands on the deck of his sister’s ship, sword drawn, awaiting her command, and feels none of those things. Only _wrong_.

The rowers work with seasoned precision, weaving deftly between red and blue sails alike. Above their heads, cutting through the din, his sister’s eagle screeches. Once. Twice. Thrice. His sister barks an order, and the _Adrestia_ veers left, and—there it is. Straight ahead, tearing through a frothing wave with sails as black as night.

Sokos.

A volley of javelins whizzes over his head, one striking a Cultist guard square in the neck. The guard falls away, sputtering on the fount of blood spewing from the wound, and it’s the sight of that blood, hot and red and gushing, that awakens the monster in him once more.

One of the _Adrestia_ men gives a great whooping cry and dives into the water, swimming in between enemy oars and hauling himself up the hull until he reaches an oar-hole and stabs inward with his spear. Others follow, diving, climbing, and stabbing, until the vessel drifts in helpless circles and the boarding party leaps forward, lunging for the guards on deck.

He dodges an axe-swing from a nearby guard, then slices through the soft, unguarded backs of the guard’s thighs and leaves him, howling in agony, for somebody else to finish off. He catches a second guard’s axe with his sword, and uses the momentum to swing them both towards the nearest brazier, leaping away just in time. The guard isn’t so lucky; he falls forward, his shriek cut short by a face-full of blazing pitch and coal—and the brazier tips under his dead weight, and suddenly the deck is consumed in flames.

Through the smoke, black and thick and scouring on his eyes—through the stench of spilt blood and split entrails and smoldering, burning hair and flesh—he sees Sokos falter, slipping on the blood-slick helm as he approaches, shoulders hunched, sword glistening in the flame-light, a lion stalking his prey.

Hazily, as though through a fog, he hears a deafening crash followed by an aching groan, and then the ship lurches sickeningly as the Spartan commander’s trireme rams into the deck, cleaving the ship in two. Over the din, his sister is shouting a name—his name, but not his name. He knows no name. Only war. His hatred is awake, and it thirsts for Cultist blood.

He bats away Sokos’ spear effortlessly, his blade slicing through the wood of the shaft like it’s a mere twig. Sokos stumbles backward, pleading. Gasping. Pathetic.

“Deimos? Deimos, what—”

He grabs Sokos by the hair and plunges his sword up into his belly, so deep that it’s buried to the hilt. He twists, and the dead man falls away, and the knee-high water around them turns a dark, cloudy crimson. The Artifact fragment around Sokos’ neck gleams gold through the murk and he takes it from its chain as if through a trance, tucking it into his waistband.

In the distance he hears his sister shouting. He turns slowly, unsteadily, on what’s left of the deck, the frothing churn of the Aegean sucking the ship down into its depths—and, if he doesn’t move quickly, him along with it.

To his left: a hulking penteconter, blue sails emblazoned with the white owl of Athena, bearing down on the Spartan fleet like a boar on a mad, blood-starved rampage. Fifty oarsmen, fifty archers. One commander, shouting orders, his back turned to the wreckage of the Cultist vessel. Exposed.

To his right: the _Adrestia_ , the other lieutenants back aboard, oarsmen retaking their positions and pulling away from the rapidly-sinking ship. His sister at the helm, voice booming as she calls to him, calls him by a name he hardly knows, ordering him to fall back. Fall back, to rejoin a crew that wants nothing to do with him.

He looks at the penteconter, then at his sister, then back at the penteconter.

 _Prove yourself_ , she’d said.

He sheathes his sword, and dives to the left.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Major spoilers for the Mykonos questline / Kyra romance. It's pretty much just referenced in passing, but still... probably good to know beforehand.

**iii.**

 

The Spartans, victorious by the skin of their teeth, have taken to calling her brother the Wolf Pup. It’s a ridiculous title, not to mention more than a little insulting, given that everybody and their grandchildren knows that the Wolf of Sparta once threw both his children from the peak of Mount Taygetos in a single night, then adopted a third to raise in their stead. For his part, Alexios doesn’t seem to react with any more than the usual barely-restrained hostility with which he comports himself around people who aren’t Kassandra or their mother—which is to say, he neither accepts nor rejects Lysander’s commendations when all is said and done and the Athenians have retreated in humiliation. He simply stands before the officers, arms crossed, dripping seawater and giving clipped, one-word responses to everything they say, until finally they dismiss him with an exasperated wave of red-gloved hands.

She intercepts Alexios before he reaches the _Adrestia_ —or, rather, what’s left of her. It’s rare that they leave a naval skirmish unscathed, but even by their usual standards they have taken a considerable beating today: the sails hang in tatters, several oars have snapped, and the hull is cracked and scorched in multiple places from repeated barrages and rammings. Poor Barnabas has been overseeing the repairs to his beloved ship all evening, ordering able-bodied crew members left and right and taking frequent pauses to wail his laments to the heavens.

It’s a small miracle that the crew have taken no fatalities, though the injured currently outnumber the unharmed by a factor of nearly two. Sacrifices will have to be made later to thank Ares and, ironically, Athena for their protection in battle, and to beseech Apollo and Asklepios for rapid healing. It makes Kassandra wish, perhaps selfishly, that Hippokrates could have accompanied them rather than stay in Lakonia to set up another temporary clinic to train his ever-growing flock of disciples. But injured soldiers come a _drachma_ a dozen these days, and he can’t be everywhere at once. Better to remain someplace where his teachings can spread further, than to confine himself indefinitely to a single ship and crew.

Kassandra sighs, bone-tired. _Adrestia_ will live to sail another day, but even with the funds they’ve earned for their part in winning the battle, that day will be a while yet. And as for Alexios’ plan to take the Cultist’s vessel and sail it to Kythera—well. That plan now lies in charred and splintered pieces at the bottom of the fucking ocean.

This is why she prefers to hunt pirates and corrupt merchants, not face entire fleets of fucking Athenians head-on.

“Walk with me, Alexios,” she says tersely, and her brother cocks an eyebrow but complies without a word.

 _So you’re listening to me again, are you?_ she wants to say. But only when they’ve rounded the coastline, out of earshot of crew and Spartans alike, does she let loose her anger:

“What the fuck were you thinking today?”

Alexios has the gall to look bewildered. “It was Lysander who rammed and sank the ship—”

“I don’t care about the fucking ship,” she snaps. “You disobeyed my orders.”

“I turned the battle, didn’t I?” He smirks. “If I hadn’t beheaded the Athenian commander, we’d all be lying at the bottom of the fucking ocean.”

She punches him, and finds a small morsel of satisfaction in seeing that she’s split his lip. He swings back, fury in his eyes, but she dodges out of the way and catches him with a blow to the side, sending him sprawling into the cold, damp sand.

“You disobeyed my fucking orders,” Kassandra says again.

Alexios pulls himself to his feet, glowering. “You told me to prove myself to your crew,” he growls, swiping at his lip, “so that’s what I did. What the fuck would you have had me do?”

“You took on a penteconter on your own!” she yells. “A hundred men, on a ship twice the size of the _Adrestia_! In defiance of my direct orders as your captain, and with every odd stacked against you!”

“I saw an opportunity, so I took it!” he yells back. “Don’t act all high and mighty, Kassandra, not when I know you’ve done the exact same thing countless times before, and would have again if you were in my position.”

“You could have fucking died, Alexios! Did you even think about that?”

“Oh, so you’re still trying to protect me, is that it?” There is fury in her brother’s eyes, as sharp and cold as the sword he carries, and his lip curls in a feral snarl. “Give it up, sister. You haven’t been able to protect me since I was six months old.”

Biting back a _go fuck yourself_ , Kassandra turns on her heel and heads back towards the _Adrestia_. She keeps a cask of good, strong Chios wine tucked inside the chest where she stores her spare armor and weapons. Dionysos willing, it’s still there even after the beating they took; if there was ever a time she needed a stiff drink, it’s tonight.

“You said I had a choice,” Alexios calls, and Kassandra stops in her tracks. “That I’m a free man. Yet you expect me to follow your orders blindly, as if I don’t have a mind of my own.”

And he laughs that terrible, bitter laugh that she hates.

“These past few days,” he continues, “I almost managed to convince myself that you saved me. That you pulled me out of a waking nightmare, and gave me my life back. Whatever trick you pulled with your spear, making me see all those things you wanted me to see, that was a good one. But I know the truth: you just want me as a weapon, the same as everybody else.”

“You really think that of me?” she asks softly, turning to face him. “That I’ve just been using you for my own benefit this whole time?”

“Am I wrong?” he asks, sneering. “You said you trusted me, yet all you do—all you’ve ever done—is give me orders, and turn on me when I question them, or show you that I know better. Get over yourself, Kassandra. You’re no better than the Cult.”

“Alexios—” And there’s a voice in her head that’s screaming for her to _stop, stop talking, no no no shut up don’t say it shut the fuck up Kassandra_ —

“Fine,” she tells him, voice hardening like a great stone wall to block the hurt from cleaving her heart in two. “If you really hate me that much, you can go. Do whatever the fuck you want. I won’t stop you.”

In an instant, her brother’s eyes go flat and cold, his expression blank save for a muscle working in his clenched jaw, and the wall inside her is so heavy she cannot move. Cannot find enough purchase to scale it, or find a crack to slip through or pull it down, stone by stone. To reach out and pluck those words from the air between them and throttle them, wrestle them back into the dark, wretched depths whence they reared their ugly heads.

“Great,” Alexios hisses, sharp as cracking ice, and her heart freezes in her chest as she watches her brother round the curve of the coastline and vanish into the dark.

“ _Maláka_ ,” she sighs, some seconds or minutes or perhaps hours later, to no one in particular, and the swear tastes sour on her tongue. Ikaros chooses that moment to swoop down, and she holds out an arm for him to perch. Perhaps he’s sensed her distress and has come to keep her company. Or perhaps he’s just tired. She wouldn’t blame him if he was. They both are.

“He’s not coming back this time, is he?” she murmurs, but of course he has no answer. The realization hits her with a heavy finality and settles in the pit of her stomach, smothering the part of her that wants to scream and rage and chase after her brother—to beg him to turn around, to _come back, please, Alexios, I know you’re hurting I know I hurt you I’m sorry we can still fix this please I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_ —

Instead, she feels herself sink to her knees in the sand and the surf, the tide washing in cold and frothy around her leaden legs. Ikaros squawks in indignation before taking to the skies again, circling above her head once, twice, before disappearing from view.

Go figure.

She watches the moonlight sparkling on the waves as they lap at her waist, and her mind drifts to Kyra, bold and sweet, laughter on her lips and sea-breeze blowing through her hair. And then she thinks of Thaletas, rage-blind, lunging for her again and again, until finally he’d fallen at her feet, his blood soaking through every layer of her armor. She’d burned that armor as best she could, separate from the pyre she’d built for him, after stitching shut the hole she’d torn through his heart. Watched the breeze lift his ashes up and away, across the very same sea where she and Kyra had frolicked just the night before.

Is this how it will always be? Wandering from place to place, taking on the burdens of strangers in the hope that it will fill what is empty in her, seeking desperately to perform some small act of goodness in whatever form that may take—to actually _matter_ somehow, somewhere, however briefly—only to leave everybody worse off than they were before she’d wormed her way into their affairs? A plague that ravaged Kephallonia, because she let a sick family walk free. An innocent girl butchered on the streets of Athens, an expendable casualty in a war she had no part in. One Spartan commander dead by her hand because they’d both loved the same woman; another run through with his own spear, because she wasn’t fast enough to sever the invisible strings pulling her brother’s limbs as they stained the sands of Makedonia red with his blood.

And Alexios, gone again. Swallowed by the night. As if she’d never had him back at all.

The biggest mistake the Cult of Kosmos ever made, she thinks, cackling humorlessly to herself in the surf, tears trickling down her face like a madwoman, was stealing her baby brother away to forge into their greatest and most terrible weapon. How much easier it would have been, how much time and effort they would have saved, if they’d just taken her in his stead. Because the fact of the matter is, all she’s ever done is bring death and destruction upon those foolish enough to come close. And Alexios would be free, and maybe, just maybe, Thaletas and Phoibe and Brasidas would still be alive.

Barnabas greets her just a little too warmly when she returns, dry-eyed, to the campsite—is just a little too cheerful when he tells her how optimistic he is about the two weeks it will take to get the _Adrestia_ back into sailing shape. She listens to his reports without truly hearing the words, then excuses herself as politely as she can manage, to change into dry clothes and seek out the company of her lieutenants.

Odessa is busy dressing the wound on Gelon’s arm, a parting gift from an Athenian _strategos_ who managed to weasel in a final slash before she felled him with a battleaxe to the stomach. They both keep their eyes averted as Kassandra flops down wearily by their campfire, running a hand over her face.

“You heard us yelling, didn’t you?” she asks.

“What yelling?” Odessa replies mildly, at the same time that Gelon says, “Every fucking word.”

Kassandra sighs, swigging directly from the rim of the miraculously-preserved amphora of her Chios wine. But it’s already soured into vinegar, bitter and astringent, because of fucking course it has. If she weren’t surrounded by her crew she would have hurled the entire thing at the closest cliff face, just to watch it shatter into a thousand jagged little pieces, and stain the stone and sand dark and red.

Later, she dreams once again that Brasidas is sitting beside her, whittling something out of a piece of driftwood. The flickering light of the campfire casts a soft glow on his face, tacit merriment dancing just behind his eyes in a way that does not befit a mighty Spartan warrior in the prime of his short and bloody life.

It infuriates her, how gracefully he wears peace upon his shoulders even now. He shouldn’t be here. It’s not right.

“Your haunting has officially become tedious,” she tells him. “Either talk to me, or move on.”

As always, her words fall on deaf ears. She reaches over to touch his shoulder, to grab him, shake him, _go away move the fuck on don’t let me keep you here like this_ —but her hand passes through him like smoke and still he gives no indication that he knows she’s there.

“I miss you,” she whispers.

And: “Forgive me.”

He looks up at her then, with his kind eyes and sad smile, mouthing words she cannot hear.

Lysander and his men depart the next morning, leaving the _Adrestia_ and her crew where they sit at the base of Typhon’s Revenge. In the cold light of a new day, Kassandra wakes with an ache in her chest and the sour aftertaste of words like poisoned daggers still on her tongue. She sends Ikaros to scout the island for any sign of Alexios, but wherever her brother decided to go last night, he’s long gone. Nobody she asks, when she ventures into town on a supply run for Barnabas, can tell her much, either; there have been too many travelers, mercenaries, deserters, and spies—to say nothing of soldiers, or men in the guise of soldiers—coming through the Black Crescent in recent years. It’s not a matter of having no trails to track, but of having simply far too many.

What she does find, however, is something that may help take her mind off things. At least, for a little while.

The man advertising the Battle of the Hundred Hands in the middle of the _agora_ is named Drakios, and he sneers down his nose at Kassandra when she admits that she has no one to vouch for her participation. He does, however, eye the pouch of _drachmae_ on her belt with absolutely no subtlety—a pity, really, because she would have considered paying her way in just to shut him the fuck up. But he makes no effort to hide his avarice, and she’s feeling particularly spiteful, and so she walks away and leaves him empty-handed. Let the bastard scam money from somebody else. She learned her lesson in Pephka.

Still, a fight to the death with ninety-nine other willing participants sounds like far too good an opportunity to blow off some steam to pass on without at least a little more effort on her part, and so she sets about trying to find herself a sponsor.

In the Melos tavern, two different men offer to vouch for her in exchange for that which men who cannot find it for themselves always seem to demand from women. She’s almost glad for it; it’s been a while since she’s partaken in a good, simple brawl.

As she pummels the first man into a pulp, she notices somebody watching her fight. Not watching _the_ fight in the way most other people are watching—enthusiastically, jovially, perhaps a bit too drunkenly—but watching _her_ in a careful, quiet way that means she’s being analyzed. Sized up, from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and toes. She knows the look, because it’s the same one she uses to assess her opponents.

That same somebody approaches her table after the second man hobbles away to the amusement of jeering spectators.

“You’re going to have to wait for the Battle of the Hundred Hands if you want to see more of that,” Kassandra tells her.

The woman laughs, eyes twinkling warmly as she takes a seat opposite Kassandra and slides over a cup of wine. “Word on the street is, a _misthios_ named Kassandra can’t find herself a sponsor for the Battle. And the great war-horn sounds off in just a few days.”

“I don’t drink from strangers’ cups,” Kassandra says curtly, rising to her feet. “I mean no insult to you, but if you know my line of work, I’m sure you understand.”

“Then perhaps we shouldn’t be strangers,” the woman replies, following her out of the tavern. “Perhaps we can help each other.”

Kassandra raises an eyebrow. “Can we, now?”

“My name is Roxana,” the woman says, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin. “I am going to be the next Champion, but just like you, I don’t have a sponsor. Yet.”

“Yet?”

“If you vouch for me, and I vouch for you, Drakios will not be able to turn us away.”

Kassandra pauses, scrutinizing Roxana the way the woman had done for her earlier. She’s certainly fierce, Kassandra thinks, but petite. Well-muscled, with a confidence that belies her slight frame—but certainly not built like the warrior she claims to be.

Kassandra crosses her arms, smirking. “How do I know you can even hold your own in the Battle?”

With grace more befitting a dancer than a warrior, Roxana drops to the ground and sweeps her leg out in a tight arc, knocking Kassandra’s feet out from under her. She lands hard on her back, the wind forced from her lungs.

“How do _I_ know,” Roxana counters softly, kneeling down beside her with amusement twinkling in her eyes, “that you can hold _your_ own, when you are so easily taken out by the very one you underestimate?”

Kassandra can’t help a breathless chuckle as she clasps Roxana’s proffered hand. “It seems I have much to learn from you,” she says, letting Roxana pull her to her feet.

“Come, Kassandra,” Roxana says. “The rules of the Battle stipulate that no training can be done on Melos, for fear that familiarity with the terrain will create an unfair advantage. But we can train at my house on Hydrea Island.”

If Kassandra is a little too eager to accept the invitation, Roxana makes no comment—simply goes to commandeer a skiff from a nearby fishmonger while Kassandra gathers what she needs from camp: her _kopis_ , her bow and quiver, some food, and a spare pair of nice bronze gauntlets she’d been eyeing since she pulled them off a bloated Athenian corpse that had washed ashore the previous evening.

“It’s no problem at all!” Barnabas proclaims when she tells him sheepishly of her intentions to join the Battle in lieu of staying to help repair the _Adrestia_. “Where the gods granted you no proficiency whatsoever in carpentry, they made up for it a thousandfold in your battle prowess. Go—win—and perhaps you’ll even consider putting some of that cash prize towards our ship repairs!”

Coming from anybody else, it would be a backhanded compliment dripping with passive-aggression, demanding an equally flippant punch in the throat. From Barnabas, however, it just elicits a rueful smile, and gods know she needed that. He seems to know it, too, judging by the twinkle in his eye.

She is quite shit at carpentry anyway.

When she rejoins Roxana by the docks, the first stars have already begun to peek out into the night sky.

They make landfall on Hydrea late in the night, Roxana leading the way to a little hut bordering an apple farm. The kitchen area is small but warm, and Kassandra stokes the cooking fire and burns it down to smoldering embers while Roxana brings out a spare bedroll and pile of furs for Kassandra to make her bed. They’ll start training at first light, Roxana says; in the meantime, she should make herself right at home.

Kassandra doesn’t have the heart to tell her she has no idea what the fuck that even means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy (almost) New Year, folks! Thank you so much for all the encouragement and kind words you've left on this fic — they truly mean the world to me, and I'm so honored that you're all coming with me on this journey :) See you all in 2019!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: past abuse/child abuse/gaslighting, dissociation, suicidal ideation, dubious consent, canon-typical violence
> 
> Basically almost all the warnings listed above apply to this chapter. I tried to cover everything, but if I missed something, _please_ let me know and I'll be happy to add it!

**iv.**

 

He still remembers the first time he set foot on Kythera Island, gazing in restrained awe at the towering statue of Aphrodite in Skandeia Harbor, in the autumn of his thirteenth year.

He remembers thinking she was beautiful, then wondering if she was cruel as well. If her kind of love was anything like the love he knew, and why in the fuck anybody would want to worship something so bitter. And he remembers keeping those thoughts to himself, for the goddess was not his to worship, and if Chrysis found out it would make her very angry.

He always seemed to make Chrysis angry, because he never knew how to be the god he was born to be.

(Secretly, he thought the old hag should just tell him how to be, since she seemed to know so fucking much about that anyway. But the one time he had dared to point it out, she’d locked him in a damp, windowless cellar for a week, so that in its tomb-like silence he might finally listen to his own divinity speaking through his veins—and from then on he was always mindful to watch his fucking mouth.)

But it was finally time, Chrysis had decided, to kill the boy within him in order to awaken the godhood lying dormant in his blood. There was a young woman on Kythera Island, not much older than himself, who wore the face of a priestess of Aphrodite during the day, and conducted rituals to Kosmos in the dark of the night. Secret rituals. Blood rituals. For there was a powerful magic to be found there, in special bloodlines. So powerful, they said, that even Zeus himself turned from it in fear.

But not Kosmos. Not the Cult.

His bloodline was special. His mother didn’t know that, when she threw him away. Or perhaps she did know, and feared it. Feared _him_. Left him to die, rather than face the thing she had birthed. But Chrysis knew. Chrysis knew everything. She had saved him, when nobody else would lift a finger to help the poor, broken baby in the Sanctuary of Asklepios. She saw something special in him. Nursed him back to health, raised him as her own. Gave the little infant god a home.

The ritual would hurt, he was warned, unlike any other pain he had ever experienced. Everything Chrysis and the others had ever bestowed upon him—the beatings, the hunger, the confinement—all was in preparation for this. If he survived, they said, that meant he was indeed a god. And if he perished… well. He wouldn’t perish, so the point was irrelevant.

Couldn’t?

Wouldn’t.

“Show me that I didn’t waste my time with you all these years, boy,” was the last thing Chrysis said to him, before the ritual began.

For seven days they lashed him until his flesh split, spilling his mortal blood, and he had to bite down on his lip to keep from crying out. There, too, he tasted his own blood and willed it to drain away his humanity. Then they washed his wounds with seawater to cleanse their new god, and held him down and branded them shut with red-hot pokers to seal in the divinity that was his birthright. Again and again, for seven days, from sunup to sundown, until he gave in and began to scream, until he sobbed for them to _stop stop please stop I don’t want to be a god find somebody else just let me die please_ and still they beat him and beat him and beat him until his sobs turned into senseless babbling, his screams to raucous, hysterical laughter.

For seven nights he drank only of the _kykeon_ prepared by the false priestess, blood and wine and snake venom mixed together into a concoction that burned as he swallowed it, and he fought to keep it down. It made him sick, amplified the pain from his lashings tenfold or more. That was good. That meant the ritual was working, that the part of him that wanted to be a god was killing the part of him that was still a boy. The _kykeon_ would give him visions, they told him. It would let him see things that only gods could see.

What he saw was horror. Shadows chasing him in the dark, overtaking him, drowning him in their cold. Lights blinding him, burning him, piercing into the very center of his being. Bloodless faces frozen in ghastly grins and black, bottomless sockets where the eyes should have been—sockets crying tears of hot, red blood—blood turning to snakes when it hit the ground—snakes rearing up to wrap themselves around his neck, tighter and tighter, fangs sinking deep into his throat, venom like pitch-fire crawling through his veins.

He saw a woman, taller and more beautiful than even Aphrodite herself, cradling a broken baby. Running, running, running, until the thing in her arms grew too heavy and she could run no further. Then he watched her drop him to the ground, bloody and broken, so that she could run again. _Come back_ , he wanted to scream, _don’t leave me please I’ll be good I’ll be good just come back I’m sorry please_ —but all that came out was a mangled wail and still his mother ran and ran and ran. And he felt a wrenching agony like his heart was being ripped from his chest, and a fury that roared through him like a wounded creature, and he hated her as he had never hated anything before.

He told this to Chrysis when it was finally over, curled on his side, more dead than alive, godly blood still oozing through the bandages wrapped around his blistered wounds. Whispered it through cracked lips in a voice hoarse from screaming, half-mad and babbling. It hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked. His laughter spilled forth like a bubbling brook and he was dying _let me die please please kill me let it end I’m not a god I want to die_ —

“Oh, but it did work,” murmured Chrysis as she daubed at his pale and sweaty brow with a cool, damp rag. “You will heal, and you will be strong, and you will be magnificent. You will pay back the pain and the fury and the hatred a thousandfold to a world that never wanted you, and all will tremble in terror at your feet.”

And she said, “I’m so proud of you, my child. My perfect terror. My Deimos.”

And she pressed a kiss to his temple, gentle like a mother, and Deimos wept, and wept and wept and wept.

 

———

 

He watches himself step onto the docks of Skandeia Harbor as though from far away; watches his own hands pay the merchant who brought him here with the coins he’d pickpocketed from the Melos _agora_ the night he and his sister hurled accusations back and forth like poison-tipped daggers and tore their fragile truce asunder. His rage had faded as rapidly as it had flared, its smoldering embers blanketed in the bitter heaviness of shame and regret; in the two days he’s been at sea since then, even that has dulled to a numbness that envelops him like a thick, unseen fog.

 _Go_ , she’d commanded. _I won’t stop you._

It’s not the words that had come as a surprise, not really; it’s the speed at which they’d escalated to that eventuality. But he’s known from the very start of this doomed endeavor, hasn’t he? There’s no place for him on his sister’s crew. He’s already outlived whatever use he could have been to her.

There’s vindication in knowing he’d been right this whole time, but it sits empty in his chest. They’re too similar to work in harmony, he and his sister, two sparks that when brought together set off a roaring blaze that only destroys them both. He was a fool to hope for any other outcome.

She doesn’t want him. She never fucking wanted him. She wanted her brother, not… whatever the fuck he is.

_Go._

_I won’t stop you._

Funny. All his posturing, all his protestations to the contrary—and yet, at the end of it all, he still did exactly as she’d ordered. And now he stands on the edge of the island where Alexios not-of-Sparta gave his life to the monster of Kosmos all those years ago, and there’s no place left for him to go.

He watches the mid-morning bustle of the little sea-town around him, shaded by the statue of Aphrodite in the square. She seems to grow smaller and smaller upon his return to this place year after year, and yet she’s always loomed massive in his memory. The first thing anyone sees, when they make landfall here. Sparkling in her grandeur, lushly adorned with wreaths and flowers, a monument to the goddess here on the island of her birth. Her likeness will stand here, he thinks, long after he is gone. After the Cult is gone and all the townspeople are gone, on and on and on, into eternity.

Except the Cult won’t be gone. There will always be a Cult, for Kosmos is everywhere, and all things are Kosmos. He has witnessed firsthand the extent of their reach, the power they have to shatter and re-form just about anything into tools for their exploit. There’s no winning against them, and it takes a special brand of fool to even bother trying.

He is no fool. He didn’t come here to win.

He finds Diona where he always finds her: at the little shrine at the side of the road that runs between the harbor and Kythera proper, blessing worshippers in the shade of an olive tree, dappled sunlight shining on her golden curls. She pales when she sees him but does not falter in the prayer she is reciting for the sour old harbormaster who kneels before her, only gives him the smallest shake of her head.

_Not now. Not here._

_Meet me where you always meet me, when you come to renew your blessings._

So he goes and lets himself into her house up on Pilgrim Hill, as he always does. In the kitchen he pours himself a brimming cup of wine and picks a few figs from the heaping bowl on the table, realizing that he hasn’t eaten in days. Not since he sat with his sister on her ship, forcing down cold stew and watching the stars. But thinking about his sister only makes him feel hollowed out, as if something inside him has been torn away, and so he sits on a bench and drinks the cool, sweet wine and eats the shriveled, sweet figs. And waits.

Diona’s eyes are narrowed suspiciously when she finally enters the kitchen. She doesn’t turn her back to him once as she crosses the room to pour her own wine, and he sees her brush a surreptitious hand against her right thigh, where he knows she conceals a dagger beneath the flowing folds of her priestess’ robes.

“I heard you were dead,” she says, betraying no emotion in her voice. “That a stray arrow pierced your heart during the battle over Amphipolis.”

“It takes more than an arrow to kill a god,” he replies.

“I also heard you turned. That the other child of the bloodline fed you lies and bade you forsake Kosmos.” She takes her time picking a fig, rolling it between her fingers, before setting it back down and selecting another to do the same. “Stories come cheap these days, it seems; everybody’s peddling one. So tell me, Deimos: what’s yours?”

“I was lying low,” he tells her with a shrug. “Biding my time. My si—the other one is strong, and we are weak. But I have managed to win her trust. It took less time than I expected; she was just so happy to have her little brother back.”

 _She doesn’t want you,_ hisses a voice in his mind.

“Did she send you here?”

He shakes his head. “She thinks I’m scouting for leads in Messara.” It rolls so smoothly off his tongue, it takes him a moment to remember it’s a lie.

_She never wanted you._

“So why _are_ you here?” asks Diona.

His lips tug themselves up into the pale imitation of a smirk. “You know why.”

Diona smiles wide as she crosses the room and straddles his lap, golden locks cascading down bare, soft shoulders.

“I’ve missed you, Deimos,” she purrs, her thumb toying with his lips until he parts them for her.

Her lips are soft against his, sweet with a hint of spice from the wine, and after so many years of returning to her it should all feel familiar—except now when he kisses her back, as he always does, he feels something inside him growing colder and colder. She must sense it too, because she breaks away, looking puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, running a hand through his tangled hair.

It’s not concern, he thinks. Not entirely. There’s an edge to her voice, a hardness. Annoyance, perhaps, would be a better word for it. Or suspicion. Something isn’t as it always is. Something is wrong.

 _He_ is wrong.

He shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

He kisses her again, willing, wishing, hoping for the warmth to come, as it always had in the past, but in his heart of hearts he knows it’s gone. Perhaps it was never really there.

Diona pulls away, smiling once again. It does not reach her eyes, and suddenly he wonders if it ever has. Years upon years of returning here, into her embrace, and he cannot recall ever noticing one way or another.

How did he never notice until now?

“Come, Deimos,” she says. “There will be time later to renew your blessings, but for now you should rest. You’ve had a long journey.”

He lets her take his hand and lead him to her bedchamber, as light-filled and airy as it always is, the same loose flowers and petals scattered upon the rugs, the floor-cushions, the bed: just the way he knows she likes. She calls two servants to tend to him, and he lets them remove his armor and sword and take them elsewhere for cleaning and safekeeping. Then he lets them wash him, scrubbing away the dirt and the grime and the dust, until his skin is pink and the lines of his scars are white, and he watches them move around him as if he were watching it happen to somebody else.

They light the scented candle-lamps around the room and dress him in a new _chiton_ , soft and clean and murex-purple. They pour him more wine, and for lack of anything better to do he sits on the edge of the bed and drinks, waiting again for Diona. This wine tastes sharper than the one before, drier and more spiced, perhaps, and he can’t help but wonder what his sister would say if she could see him now: musing on the different types and tastes of wine while sitting in a room bedecked in flowers, freshly bathed and dressed like he’s attending a fucking symposium.

Remorse rises again inside him, coiling snake-like round his innards. She’s had him all turned around, these past few days—but no, that’s not right, is it? She’s had him all turned around from the moment he forced both their hands on the Artifact, what feels like an entire lifetime ago: back when she was just a meddling interloper and he still thought he knew exactly who he was.

But he’s never been able to predict her actions, has he? She wasn’t supposed to be alive, for one thing. She wasn’t supposed to get in his head, for another. Wasn’t supposed to reach out and chip away, time and again, at everything he was ever taught to believe, as a sculptor hews and hammers at a block of stone, until all he could do was watch himself take the broken spear she offered and follow her dazedly to a home that didn’t feel like home.

She shouldn’t have done that. He never asked her to do that. Everything could have ended there— _should_ have ended there, clean and simple, up on the mountaintop where everything ends.

_She doesn’t want you. She never wanted you._

_She wanted her little brother, but you’re just the monster wearing his face._

There’s a rustle at the door and he looks up to see Diona eyeing him with appreciation, with unrestrained lust, with that smile that has never once reached her eyes. She takes the winecup from him and sets it aside, climbing into his lap, running her hands beneath his new tunic, hiking it up, hitching up her skirts. She will use him now to sate the urges within her; he knows this, because they have always used one another in this way. Renewing his blessings, she likes to call it, because she is a priestess after all, and what better way is there to justify fucking a god?

She strokes his cock with practiced expertise, then sinks herself down and takes him inside of her. He shudders at her heat as he watches her move, her head tossed back, lost in the pursuit of her own pleasure, and he mimics the motions he knows so well after all these years—what he knows she wants, what he knows she likes—and feels nothing at all.

When she is through with him she climbs off and goes to clean herself with a cloth from her bedside while he sips his wine. It burns a little as it goes down, but warms him in his belly in a way she doesn’t. Never has, he now realizes, much as he had once longed for it, and in so longing thought himself enamored, and called it love.

“You know, Deimos,” she says as she re-straightens her _peplos_ , “of all the stories I’ve heard of late, there is one that troubles me the most. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.”

He sips his wine, but says nothing.

“I heard the Eagle Bearer waits nearby, lurking in the dark like a panther waiting to strike. I heard she has a brother, now, who does her every bidding. That all she has to do is point, and he attacks. Like a dog groveling to its master.”

 _No_ , he thinks. _That is not the truth of it._

_The truth of it is this: she doesn’t want me._

“I heard she engaged one of ours in a naval battle just the other day. Boarded his ship, set it ablaze, sent his entire crew to meet Poseidon.”

She pulls something small and metallic from the folds of her dress. Triangular, glinting with that eerie light that seems to come from within. Taken from his waistband where he’d stashed it, he realizes, when she’d had her servants tend to him. And her voice is soft and cold as she asks a question to which they both already know the answer:

“But it wasn’t she who dealt our brother in Kosmos the killing blow, was it?”

Suddenly it occurs to him that she has not drank a drop of wine since she came in here to fuck her god.

She always drinks wine when she comes in here to fuck her god.

Nausea hits him like a wave as he rises, shakily, to his feet. He stumbles for the door— _sword, fuck, he needs his sword where is his sword_ —but it’s too far: he doubles over with a groan and drops to his knees as the poison works its way through his body.

The room swims before him, blurred and unfocused, and when he looks up Diona is there, crouching before him as he struggles to draw breath, each gasp a stab of agony.

“Why did you do it, Deimos?” she hisses, a hand gripping his chin, forcing him to look up, to look her in the eyes. Eyes that leer, and scheme, and calculate. Eyes that never smile. “Why did you turn on us, after all we’ve done for you?”

“You poisoned me,” he says hoarsely, a little bubble of laughter bursting through his lips. “All of you, this whole time. You stole me away. Taught me only pain, fed me only hate. You turned me into a monster.”

He coughs and tastes bile as his stomach heaves and clenches, and the pain is blinding and he cackles like a madman.

“What do you think happens when a caged animal tastes fresh air for the first time in its life, and learns to fight back against its captors?”

Diona backhands him, her beautiful face contorted into a mask of cold and righteous fury.

“Maddened beasts,” she snarls, drawing her dagger from its sheath, “get put out of their misery.”

He doesn’t feel it pierce his side until she twists, and still he laughs and laughs, his mirth spilling forth in unison with his blood. They were the ones, after all, Diona and her ilk, who taught him to embrace his pain—to welcome it as one welcomes a lover into bed; now, after everything, it feels like nothing short of fucking absolution.

And the monster in him wakes once more. Hating. Thirsting for blood.

There’s a roaring in his ears as he lunges forward with what strength he can muster, grabbing Diona by the throat with both hands and slamming her to the ground.

“My sister is coming,” he hisses, laughing as he strangles her. “She’s coming for every last one of you. You are nothing to her; she’ll cut you down like weeds in a field, and then she’ll set the field ablaze and salt the ashes so that nothing else will ever grow from your blight. You’re finished. Kosmos is finished. You’ll be forgotten, your legacy scattered to the four winds and trampled back into the dirt and filth whence you came.”

There’s no winning against the Cult, he thinks. But if someone were to do so, against all odds and with everything stacked against their favor, it would be his sister. So he will do what he can in service of that end, for what is he—what has he always been, since the night they tore him from his mother’s arms—but a perfect, terrible weapon?

_She never wanted you._

Again and again the cold bite of iron tears into him as Diona stabs and slashes, and the pain is sharp and sickening, and he has scarcely any breath left to cry out in agony. But he only tightens his grip, and watches dimly as her eyes grow wide and panicked; her mouth gaping, gasping, soundless; her body writhing and flailing as she tries to fight him off.

“My sister is coming,” he rasps as her struggles weaken. A dark mist creeps into his vision and his arms shake with the effort it takes to keep himself upright, to keep her pinned with his thumbs pressed into her windpipe, and her face is turning purple, so purple, as purple as the murex shells that dyed his now blood-soaked tunic. “She’ll paint the earth red with your blood, and send you screaming down to Tartarus.”

She stabs him one final time, and the blade buries itself deep, deep inside his chest, and a great spasm of pain wracks his body, and for a moment all he sees is grey. Then he’s back, his poisoned, mortal blood spilling out onto his blood-slick hands still wrapped around Diona’s throat, and he leans in close and whispers into her ear:

“I’ll be there. I’ll be waiting.”

And he snaps her neck with a sickening crack and falls back, the last of his strength leaving him as he watches through heavy eyes the delicate, scattered flowers wilting away in the growing pool of red around him. His blood is hot as it spills over his hands—mortal blood, _human_ blood—and yet he feels so very cold.

 _I’m not a god_ , he thinks. _I never was._

He shivers as the mist closes in, longing suddenly for his mother’s touch. For a home that never felt like home, that should have— _could_ have felt like home, in some dim and unfathomable future that no longer exists for him. For a mother who is kind and gentle, who embraces him without striking him, whose touch is warm but doesn’t burn. For a sister who loves him fiercely, who forgives all he’s ever done in service of the lies that tore them apart, who fights—sometimes with him, yes, but always for him—with everything she has. Who sits by his side all night, out under the stars, and tells him stories.

He can’t see the stars from here, he realizes with a wrenching sob. When he closes his eyes, it’s just black. Dark and cold and nothing.

He never did ask his sister about those stories.

 

———

 

_He sees it once more: a moment captured in time, like a painting in an old and dusty tomb. He sees himself, healthy and whole, swaddled in his sister’s arms, the stars reflected in his wide, bright eyes as they both look to where their mother points, her fingers tracing out story after fantastical story in the sky._

_“Look—there is Perseus, and the hunter Orion, and even the great Herakles himself,” Myrrine is saying._

_Kassandra wrinkles her nose. “They’re all men,” she complains. In her arms, he gives a happy little gurgle._

_“Aye, so they are, my darling,” Myrrine murmurs, stroking her hair. “But perhaps it is because the age of great men has already passed us by. Now is the time for great women to begin writing their stories.”_

_“Are you writing your story,_ mater _? Will you slay a great beast one day?”_

_Myrrine laughs. “By the gods, Kassandra! Is it not heroic enough for me to get little Alexios to sleep through a single night? You want me to go and find a beast to slay as well?”_

_From across the yard they hear Nikolaos’ unmistakable snort behind the shield he is busy polishing._

_“I’ll write a story for you,_ mater _,” Kassandra proclaims. She dangles a finger for his little baby hands to grab, smiling fondly when he does just that. “Alexios can come, too, of course. We’ll have so many grand adventures, the gods will need a new sky just for us.”_

_His sister’s arms are warm around him. Strong. Safe. And she leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead, wet and sloppy and perfect, and he looks into her eyes, his little hand brushing her face, and he knows in this moment that he is loved._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: smut, mild spoilers for the Roxana/Battle of the Hundred Hands questline.

**v.**

 

Roxana, Kassandra learns quickly, is as skilled a fighter as any she’s ever encountered—half their size, perhaps, but twice as ferocious. Like the Spartiates, she favors a spear and shield, and though hers are simple compared to the master craftsmanship of those used by the military elite, she wields them with as much deadly precision and expertise as the most seasoned warriors. And as often as Kassandra manages to outmaneuver her, she finds herself on the flat of her back with the wind knocked out of her lungs, and Roxana extending a hand to pull her to her feet. They are evenly matched, Kassandra thinks, and that’s something that she rarely finds in any sparring partner. At least, not since—

The flat of Roxana’s spear smacks into her temple, sending her reeling. Instinctively, she rolls with the blow, intending to let the momentum carry her in a tight, rolling arc so that she ends up behind Roxana, which will give her an opening to counterattack. But it’s a move she uses often, and her opponent knows it, and so all she gets is a shield in her face and a spear-tip thrust into the dirt a hair’s breadth from her throat.

“You’re distracted again, Kassandra,” Roxana chides, hoisting her shield again. “You think too much, and that will be the death of you. What did I say about living in the moment?”

Still on her side, Kassandra lunges out with an arm, pulling Roxana’s ankle out from under her. She falls with a thud, with a cry of surprise, and not without a good-natured bark of laughter. They lie side-by-side on the dirt for a moment, laughing, regaining their breath, before starting again.

_Live in the moment_ seems to be Roxana’s mantra. And it suits them well, for neither wants to acknowledge that one or both of them will almost certainly be dead when the Battle is done. Neither of them points out that what this training will achieve, more than anything else, is to equip each with the knowledge needed in order to most efficiently kill the other.

It helps, too, to ease that feeling of being smothered alive by the ghosts that cling to Kassandra more nights than not. She is not a mercenary here, or an ally for hire. Not a daughter. Not a sister. Here is where she simply fights, hour after hour—where she lets the insidious, hissing whispers of _not enough not enough not enough_ go silent, drowned out in the frenzy of training at Roxana’s side.

Because Roxana is—there’s no other way to put it—captivating. She laughs when Kassandra tells her that she moves like a dancer, but it’s true: she’s lithe and graceful in her movements in a way that belies her deadliness. With her slender frame and smooth, dark skin unmarred by battle scars, Roxana looks diminutive, but to underestimate her is a mistake that many will pay for with an irreversible trip to see the ferryman.

And when they’re not trading blows, Roxana tells Kassandra of her family. There’s a practiced ease in the way she speaks of her parents and brother, all three of them dead at the hands of past Battle contenders. She is warm and open in her demeanor, in spite of the glimpses of the lonely life that peek through her quick laughter, the crinkled humor in the corners of her eyes, and Kassandra finds herself responding in kind, teetering on the edge of lowering her own defenses in return.

_Surely it’s all a strategy_ , says the battle-hardened mercenary in her head. _She means to disarm you in more ways than one, wants you to make yourself vulnerable so that she can defeat you and all the more easily win like she so boldly declared she would. You would do well to be more cynical._

Or perhaps, argues a voice that comes from within her stubborn heart, Roxana is a breath of fresh air, the respite she didn’t know she needed but now yearns for, as a ship to harbor in the constant storm of upheaval that doesn’t seem to so much interrupt Kassandra’s life as define it. And the fact of the matter is: for the first time in a long, long time, she is able to sleep through the night, unplagued by visits from her dear and voiceless dead. And her relief upon waking only feels like a betrayal until Roxana enters the kitchen at first light, greeting her with still-tired eyes and a drowsy but affectionate smile.

Not three hours later, Kassandra knows for certain that—for better or for worse—she’s fallen for Roxana completely.

It happens innocuously enough, while they’re practicing their marksmanship on the infestation of wolves that have been besieging the neighboring apple farm. They’ve tracked the pack all the way to their den on northern shore of the island when Roxana places a hand between Kassandra’s shoulder blades, a reminder to square her stance and steady her aim before she lets her arrow fly. It lasts no more than a moment, but her touch makes Kassandra’s mouth go dry for reasons completely unrelated to the heavy volcanic heat of the island—makes her heart skip and flutter in a way that has nothing to do with to the thrill of this particular hunt. She feels lightened, as if a weight to which she’d grown reluctantly accustomed has been lifted from her shoulders, and when she looses her arrow, it flies straight and true.

Roxana catches her eye afterwards, grinning wickedly as they skin the carcasses for their pelts, and it’s all Kassandra can do to resist the urge to kiss her right then and there, bloody and stinking and up their elbows in wolf viscerae as they both are.

The third and final day on Hydrea, Roxana informs her with a wink that suggests that Kassandra has been anything but subtle in the attention she’s paid her training partner, is all about endurance.

It’s a simple foot race until they reach the base of Lover’s Leap, and then it becomes a mad dash to be first to scale the mountain. Roxana is hot on her trail as she pulls herself up to summit, both of them gasping for breath, muscles shaking with exertion, hair plastered to sweat-streaked foreheads and necks.

“Is that all we’re doing today?” Kassandra asks when she’s regained her breath.

“Oh, Kassandra...” Roxana laughs and hooks a finger in her waistband, tugging at her until they’re standing chest-to-chest. Her eyes glint with mischief. “We’ve only just begun.”

“Is that so?” Kassandra breathes. Her lips are so close to Roxana’s that they brush lightly against hers when she speaks.

Roxana’s fingers are fire on her bare stomach as she slips them beneath her waistband, exploring the curves of her hips, her lower back, and Kassandra can’t help a low, whining groan as finally, finally, she captures Roxana’s mouth in a hungry kiss. Her own fingers make quick work of the fastenings of Roxana’s armor, casting it aside along with her own, and she guides them back to the patch of soft grass, taking a moment to drink in the sight of Roxana splayed beneath her.

She trails kisses down the hollow of her neck, between her pliant breasts, down to the patch of black, curly hair between her legs and _oh =_ , her mouth waters so as she plants little kisses on the insides of Roxana’s thighs, teasing ever closer, and—

“Not yet, _misthios_.” Roxana lifts Kassandra’s chin with her finger and grins wickedly. She sits up, leaning in as if for a kiss, then in one swift motion she flips them both about so that she has Kassandra pinned, holding her wrists above her head with a firm hand while the other drifts tantalizingly downward. “Let’s see how long _you_ last first.”

And if Kassandra thought those long, skilled fingers were fire before, they’re even doubly so now, working deftly at the slick, wet folds of her cunt, first one finger, then two, then three, stroking so deep inside her she thinks she might just die then and there, and it feels too fucking good to even be embarrassed by how little it takes for her to cry out with a needy little whimper, for her hips to give a spastic buck as she whines and writhes and fucks herself senseless on Roxana’s perfect fingers.

The world around them falls away, irrelevant, and Roxana tells her _not yet, n_ _ot yet_ even as she curls her fingers inward and whispers filthy things that make Kassandra’s heart hammer in her chest like a caged beast, a great wave of heat building inside of her, mountainous and rising, rising, rising and _fuck, oh fuck, yes, Roxana, shit, please, gods above, please, please, fuck, yes, Roxana, please_ —

Then Roxana lowers herself down, running her tongue over Kassandra’s clit and into her folds, and there’s nothing else in the world but Kassandra taking and taking and taking everything that Roxana has to give—

And Roxana swirls her tongue just so, and the wave crests and comes surging down in great heaves and shudders as Kassandra arches her back and screams her climax to the heavens.

When she is able to move again, she pulls Roxana to her. Lifts a languid hand to cup her cheek. Draws her in for slow, lazy kisses, tasting herself on her lover’s lips.

“Not bad, _misthios_ ,” Roxana murmurs. “Not bad at all.”

Thoroughly spent, Kassandra can only close her eyes and hum sleepily in response.

When she wakes again, the sun is just beginning to set, painting the sky in brilliant oranges and purples. Roxana stirs beside her, so Kassandra leans over to plant butterfly kisses on her bare, dark shoulder.

“Kassandra?”

“Hmm?”

“You know what I’m fighting for tomorrow,” Roxana says, turning to face her, “but I don’t yet know why you’re doing it.”

And just like that, everything Kassandra has been meticulously stowing away for the past three days comes rushing back. All the worries, all the fears. All the ghostly whispers. _Not fast enough. Not strong enough. Not good enough._

_You’re no better than the Cult._

“I had a bad fight with my brother,” she admits. “I needed a distraction. It’s not as noble a cause as yours, but it’s the truth.”

Roxana laughs, and the sound is as bright and melodious as a tinkling bell. “Siblings can be a _malákes_ pain, can’t they?”

Kassandra hums in agreement, intertwining their fingers and brushing a soft kiss on Roxana’s knuckles. She feels a gnawing guilt for hardly sparing Alexios a second thought these past few days and wonders where he is now, what he’s doing. If he’s eating enough, if he has a place to sleep. If he truly is better off without her.

If she’ll ever see him again.

_But that was what you wanted when you decided to come here, wasn’t it? A distraction from all the worrying?_

_Gods above, no wonder he fucking left._

Her conflict must show on her face, much as she tries to hide it, because then Roxana says:

“This brother of yours—will you tell me about him?”

Kassandra exhales slowly, chewing her lip. What can she tell Roxana about her mess of a family that will not send the poor woman running and screaming in the opposite direction? What right does she have to unleash the chaos that is her life on someone so blissfully untouched by it?

_But you kept things from Brasidas. And he died anyway._

_Maybe if you’d told him everything, he’d still be alive._

But then her eyes meet Roxana’s, and what she sees before her is a woman who refuses to be underestimated. A woman who has opened her home, and her heart, to somebody she deems her equal. Who is not cowed in the face of almost certain death waiting for the both of them at the sounding of the great war-horn in the morning, but rises to meet it with the ferocity of Artemis and the grace of Athena combined.

She could stand to be more like Roxana, she thinks.

“He was a healthy baby—loud, but happy, before he was stolen from us,” she says. “Then he was made into a weapon. Beaten, burned. Reborn in pain, forged in lies, and tempered in hatred. He drank their poison willingly, because nobody allowed him to want better for himself. Nobody showed him he could spit it back out, or that there was any other way to live.”

“And now?” asks Roxana.

“Now he is free,” Kassandra replies. “But I don’t think anybody knows who he is now. Least of all him. And I fear that nothing I do to try and help will ever be enough. That the hurt lives so deep within that removing it completely would destroy him in the process.”

She sighs, long and shuddering. “I cannot do that to him. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did. But I have no idea how to be a sister to a man I barely know.”

“He is your brother,” Roxana says gently. “For as long as he lives, he will always be your brother. Poisoned or not, hold onto that. Let that be enough.”

_He hates me_ , she almost says, but her throat tightens and no words come out. _He was home and safe at last, but I was angry and I was thoughtless and I pushed him away, and now he hates me once more. I will always hurt him, and he will always hate me._

“Roxana…” Kassandra trails off, thinking. Roxana props herself up on an elbow, eyes big and brown and doe-like. Patient. Kind.

“This Battle,” Kassandra says, “are you driven to win it for the memories of your parents and brother? Or is it for the glory that you want for yourself?”

She worries the moment the question passes her lips that it could be heard as impertinent, condescending. But Roxana simply shrugs. “Of course I want the glory,” she says. “With the winnings I could purchase for myself a life far away from this place. From the poverty and the wolves and the pity of my neighbors. _Poor Roxana,_ they whisper when they think I cannot hear. _No friends, no family. Nothing left to her name but a shield, a spear, a hut, and a fight she cannot win._ ”

“You want to prove them wrong,” Kassandra says. “To show the world that you are more than just a girl from an island that didn’t so much raise you as it did everything it could to drag you down.”

“But it’s not just the townspeople,” says Roxana. “You asked me if I am driven by grief or glory, as if it is always one or the other. But don’t you see, Kassandra? It’s both. Losing my family like that—to contenders who themselves were cut down, whose faces I will never get to see, who will never know what they took from me—it has to mean something. _I_ have to make it mean something.”

Kassandra nods.

“I have to win tomorrow,” Roxana continues, brow furrowed at the sky as if daring the gods to defy that which she has already decided for herself, “because if I win, then that means their deaths weren’t simply more cruel, senseless acts of violence conducted by one person unto another for nothing more than avarice and bloodlust. My victory tomorrow will write my losses into a story that does not simply end with more blood staining those volcanic shores. There is no way forward for me, Kassandra, except through this fucking Battle.”

Kassandra kisses her slowly, gently. Takes her time with it, exploring every curve and corner of Roxana’s mouth, taking in as much as she can of this brilliant, beautiful, incredible woman before the Battle comes in the morning to tear them apart.

She should have learned by now to shield herself from heartbreak, to spot the warning signs long beforehand and build up those walls around her heart. But gods forgive her, she could never leave well enough alone. Not on Mykonos, not in Amphipolis, and certainly not here, not now. She feels those walls inside her crumbling, tumbling, crashing down into the sea, and she knows tomorrow she’ll fall to her knees in surf and sand with nothing left but a wreckage of her own making—but for now, she lets herself tear them down, stone after stone. Lets herself live in this moment, and wills it to last forever.

“I have sailed the Greek world from Messenia to Lesbos,” she tells Roxana. “I’ve witnessed the cruelest evils bestowed upon the most innocent and undeserving, for nothing more than avarice and bloodlust. But I have also seen goodness, and light, and redemption granted to those most corrupted by evil. Senseless cruelty runs rampant in the world, Roxana, but believe me when I tell you that it does not eclipse the good that is also out there, nor does it make your losses any less meaningful. Nobody dies in vain, not so long as there is someone to hold their memories dear.”

It is one thing to say it, and another to believe it. But if she cannot will herself to believe it—to feign more confidence in the notion than she truthfully feels—then she is lost. Crushed under the weight of her own despair, and then who will be left to take care of those she loves?

_You can’t help anyone,_ a voice in her head jeers.

But another voice snarls: _I can fucking try._

It’s the least she owes to Phoibe. It’s the least she owes to Brasidas.

“I don’t want to fight you tomorrow,” Roxana whispers.

“Well, now, that’s a real shame,” Kassandra teases gently, reaching up to wipe away the single tear trickling down Roxana’s cheek, “seeing as how you know me more intimately than any of the other contenders ever will. How I move, how I fight—”

Roxana kisses her. Kassandra lets her eyes slide shut, lets her hands explore Roxana’s body all over again, cupping her breast, running a hand through her hair, nipping ever so gently at her soft, soft lips.

“—How you gasp and tremble against me when I let you finish,” Roxana murmurs. “How you smell, how you taste. How you kiss me and set my world aflame.”

“Like nothing else exists,” whispers Kassandra, “but the two of us, together.”

Roxana’s breath is hot and honey-sweet against her lips. “Like it’s our last fucking night on earth.”

 

———

 

At the final sounding of the war-horn, only she and Roxana are left standing on the shores of Champion Point. Drakios waits by an ancient stone dais on the beach, arms crossed, watching intently. There is nothing but the soft lapping of waves on sand, and the three of them, frozen, as if Kronos himself has decided to lift them up and away from the inexorable currents of time for his own morbid amusement.

And then Roxana tosses her shield aside and drives her spear point-first into sand as black as ash, and drops to her knees.

“Make it quick, Kassandra,” she says.

Drakios drums his fingers.

Kassandra shakes her head, pinpricks of ice already piercing their way into her heart. “Why?”

“I have nothing left,” Roxana tells her, resolute, in a voice that does not waver. “No family, no friends. I dedicated my life to winning this Battle, but I have made it as far as I am willing to go.”

“We don’t have to do this,” Kassandra protests, heart pounding to the frantic rhythm of _not again not again not again_ , even as the ice inside spreads and spreads. “We can walk away, right now. Together.”

But out of the corner of her eye, she sees Drakios glance over his shoulder and wave his hand in some sort of signal—sees the unmistakable purple-and-gold shields of Cultist guards as they close in. Roxana slides her eyes over to them, too, before turning back to Kassandra.

“Where do you think they take the Champion, once it’s over?” she asks. “Ask yourself why you’ve never heard of the Battle until you came to Melos. A fight to the death that promises boundless riches and glory for the victor—but when was the last time you heard of any victors walking away with just that? I was a fool, Kassandra, taken in by the lie. My family were fools, too, and they’re better off now than the victors who slayed them. I can’t survive what comes after, but you can. I know you can.”

The Battle is nothing more than a testing ground Cultist guards, Kassandra realizes, a chill creeping down her spine. “ _Malá_ —”

Her curse is cut short as the closest guard swings his mace, catching her in the chest and sending her dazed and tumbling and breathless into the sand.

In a flash, Roxana is on her feet again, spear in hand, dancing her deadly dance. The guard who ambushed Kassandra falls quickly, Roxana’s speartip protruding from his neck, and then she’s onto the next.

Kassandra rolls away as another guard lunges for her, taking stock as she does so. The boiled leather of her chestplate is cracked; she is lucky to have switched to something heavier than her usual armor before the Battle, although another blow will likely be the end of her. But she’s worked with worse odds before, and the ice around her heart shatters as the fire inside her roars back to life.

This guard swings his javelin too widely, so parries his thrust with her _kopis_ , then uses the opening to dodge behind him, slicing through the backs of his thighs the way she’d seen Alexios do when they took the Cultist ship. The guard gives a great shriek of pain that she cuts short with a quick slash to the throat, and then she pivots on the balls of her feet and hurls her broken spear like a throwing knife at an advancing guard, cleaving his face in two where it strikes him in the narrow gap of his helmet before he can so much as think to lift his shield.

In the distance, she sees the last guard fall to Roxana’s spear, and Drakios running away along the coast. Calmly, she draws her bow and nocks an arrow. Remembers to square her stance and steady her aim, imagining Roxana’s guiding hand on her shoulders.

The arrow flies true, as she knew it would, and Drakios collapses like a ragdoll in the surf. She retrieves her spear, then goes to search his body. Roxana jogs over, and Kassandra takes the pouch from his waist and tosses it to her, heavy and jingling with _drachmae_.

“Your winnings, Champion,” she says with a wink.

A bark of laughter escapes Roxana’s lips as she sinks down beside Kassandra, crouching in the surf, turning the pouch over and over in her hands.

“What the fuck did we just do?” she asks, still wild-eyed, still half-grinning.

“Something very stupid, probably,” Kassandra replies as she rinses the blood from her sword and broken spear. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Roxana shakes her head in disbelief.

“These are the people who tore my family apart, Roxana,” Kassandra tells her. Her chest is starting to ache where the first guard struck her; she’ll be nursing an ugly bruise across her ribs by nightfall. “These are the ones who stole my baby brother and poisoned his heart with their hatred and lies. They used him to bring entire cities to their knees, and when that wasn’t enough to keep me from hunting them down, they used him to murder a man I loved before my very eyes. Their reach touches every corner of the Greek world, and I am going to find every last one of them and make them pay for all they’ve taken from me.”

“They killed my family, too, Kassandra.” Roxana speaks quietly, but her voice is as steady as ever. “Perhaps not directly, but they are still responsible.”

She looks at Kassandra with fire dancing in her eyes and extends her hand, fierce and proud.

“You told me last night that no one dies in vain, not so long as somebody is alive to cherish their memories. So let me join you, Kassandra. Let me do right by my family by helping you take these _malákes_ down.”

Whitecaps lap at their waists as they kneel side-by-side in the shallows of the volcanic shore. There is wreckage out here still, Kassandra thinks, but she will leave it where it lies, for there is no need to shield her scarred but mending heart. It sits heavy beneath the weight of all her ghosts, but it was never hers to hoard. Whatever she has left, half belongs to Roxana. And should Alexios someday grant her his forgiveness, she will readily and happily give the other half to him, and trust he keeps it safe.

She clasps Roxana’s hand in her own, pulling her close and kissing her, long and sweet and slow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I wrote that sex scene at work while my boss was out of town. Because if you can't write smut on paid company time, then when _can_ you write it?


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild spoilers for the I, Diona questline.

**vi.**

 

In a house on Pilgrim Hill on Kythera Island, a scant hundred paces from the secret entrance to the underground altar where he was born in blood and fire in the autumn of his thirteenth year, a god named Deimos dies.

Three days later, behind the still-locked doors of the Temple of Aphrodite Kytherea on the northern tip of the island, a man who is no longer a god blinks open eyes still wet with tears for dreams he can’t recall in the soft glow of the morning sun.

The high priestess who rescued him, who nursed him back from the brink of death even as he bled all over the nice white marble of her temple floor, is the spitting image of the woman he killed, and yet she is nothing like her twin. She tells him her name is Eritha, and when she clasps his hand and tells him how relieved she is that he is well, he sees that her smile reaches her eyes.

He has a hundred questions for her, but there’s a fog swirling thick and heavy in his mind and his whole body aches down to his very bones and even though he has been asleep for the better part of three days he is still so, so tired. He sips at the bitter concoction she holds to his lips because whatever it is, he figures it can’t be worse than what he’s already endured. But all it does is ease the pain and usher in sleep, and for that he is most grateful.

When he wakes again the sun is low in the sky and the fog in his head has all but dissipated. His ruined purple _chiton_ has been replaced, he realizes, with a darker one that sits loose over the bandages wrapped snugly around his chest. He winces as he pulls himself up to sitting, but the pain from his healing wounds is dull enough that he can mostly ignore it; he’s always recovered from his injuries quicker than most people, and he’s already been asleep for far too long.

Eritha is nowhere to be seen, but she has left a loaf of bread, some strips of dried, salted fish, and a still-steaming bowl of thin broth on a tray beside his cot. His stomach, free of poison now but maddeningly empty, gives a great, rumbling growl and he tears into the bread and the fish and the broth, too ravenous to wait for it to cool. It’s the first real meal he’s had, he realizes, since that slop he ate with his sist—

Oh. His sister.

All his dreams return to him now, and he realizes with a shock that he is crying. He is crying, and he wants his sister. He wants to feel what he only ever feels when he is around her, because what he feels around her is _safe_. It’s a new feeling for him, after all this time, but he’d had a taste of it that night before the ship battle and their terrible fight on the beach, and now he craves that safety with a hunger even deeper and more cavernous than the one he’s just sated.

He wants his big sister. He wants to go home.

Footsteps echo against the hard, smooth marble floor and he doesn’t so much turn in their direction as flinch and bite back a hiss of pain as his stiff, sore body screams in protest of his sudden movement. But it’s only Eritha, holding out his sword with both hands.

“It’s alright! You’re alright. It’s just me,” she whispers. If she sees that his eyes are damp, she says nothing of it.

He takes his sword with a nod of thanks, slinging its belt and sheath so that it wraps across his chest and hangs by his waist where it belongs. He still feels uncomfortably exposed without the weight of his armor on his shoulders, but at least with his sword in place he’s no longer defenseless.

“Are you feeling better?” she asks.

He nods.

“Good. The streets have been whispering of how Diona was murdered by her lover; you should be gone long before those rumors trace their way back to you, for I doubt there would be many willing to hear the truth of the matter. There is a boat waiting for you in Skandeia Harbor; you can leave as soon as it’s dark.”

“How did you find me?” he asks, unmoving. His hand drifts to the hilt of his sword. He could manage it, he thinks. His body aches deeply, but Eritha is just as petite as her sister. Should she try and make a move against him, he might still be able to—

“I’ve been paying a guard in my sister’s employ to spy on her for me. He heard a commotion in her bedchamber, found you bleeding out by Diona’s body, and sent for me immediately. We did what we could to stop the bleeding, then brought you up here to rest, away from prying eyes. I knew of you, in vague terms: that you’d come to Kythera every so often to pay Diona a visit, that the two of you ran in the same shadowed circles. What is your name?”

“Deim—Alexios.” The name still feels foreign on his tongue, but it’s what his mother and sister call him. “My name is Alexios. Why were you spying on Diona?”

And Eritha tells him a story so remarkable he would think it theater, if he hadn’t already known far too intimately what Diona was capable of.

She tells him a story of two sisters: twins, blessed by the gods, or so their parents said, to be bonded to each other in heart and soul. She tells him of the darkness that had taken root in Diona’s heart and turned it cold and black by the time they could walk and talk. She tells him of her sister’s jealousy, and her charm, and the day she realized she could conflate the two in order to get all the things she ever wanted—to fashion a noose perceptible only to Eritha, and slowly draw it tighter and tighter around her neck.

Authority fell naturally to Eritha, the first-born by a matter of mere minutes, while Diona saw herself as shackled by subservience. And so, when the title of High Priestess was bestowed upon Eritha, Diona began to plot her sister’s demise. One way or another, through poisoned drink or hired blade, or perhaps a most unfortunate accident when Eritha least expected it, there would be a reckoning for the twin priestesses of Kythera.

And just this last month Diona grew bolder than ever before; Eritha would have met her fate three times over to hired blades had her most trusted temple guard not fended them off, giving his life to slay the last sellsword. And so the doors to the Temple of Aphrodite Kytherea remained locked tight, barring the High Priestess from the rest of the island, for she knew that her sister was always watching. Waiting for the smallest mistake, an opening she could use to slip between defenses and finally, finally land the killing blow. Like a snake in tall grass, poised to strike.

It is a story of war, he realizes: more intimate, perhaps, than that which has ravaged their world for the past decade, but a war nonetheless. A war fought not on any battlefield, but entirely through espionage: sister against sister, spy against spy, invisible lines of allegiance to one priestess or another fragmenting an oblivious Kythera, its citizens unwitting pawns on an invisible game board.

Unbidden, a memory comes to him: ten or more years ago, when the war between Sparta and Athens was but a whisper on the lips of Kosmos. A few days’ respite spent largely in Diona’s bedchambers—renewing his blessings, of course—and then, from nowhere, a most puzzling request.

_Slip this note into the Megarian merchant’s ledger as you pass his stall on your way to the docks. You will recognize him by his red hair and the scar across his lip. Do not break the seal. Do not let him see your face. Say nothing of this to anybody._

What is it?

_That is not your concern._

What did he care if Diona took other lovers? he remembers thinking. If he wanted, he could slaughter them all with his bare hands: every man and woman on this island who dared to look at her the way _he_ looked at her. She was his, as he was hers. He was a fucking _god_. But if he did exactly as she asked—if he was good—she would make it worth his while.

He was always good, when she told him to be. But gods don’t bow to mortals, and perhaps that should have been the first sign that nothing in his life had ever been as he’d believed.

He was so fucking smitten. He was so fucking stupid.

“I have no idea,” Eritha says when he asks her what strife his obedience had caused her. “Do _you_ remember each and every maneuver you used in each and every battle you have fought?”

It’s a fair point.

“I have lived in fear of my sister all my life, Alexios,” says Eritha. “Do you know what that’s like? To know that your own sibling loathes you with every fiber of her being, and is actively plotting your death?”

He shakes his head. No, he doesn’t.

 _But Kassandra does_ , he thinks, guilt piercing through him like a poisoned dagger.

_All she ever wanted was for you to come home._

“When you killed Diona,” Eritha continues, “you saved my life. I am no longer bound by fear and paranoia. I can leave this temple and enjoy a stroll through the _agora_ , feel the sun on my skin and the breeze through my hair. I can pray with my people and grant them blessings in the shade of the olive trees, and lead in worship as is my duty and privilege as High Priestess. You gave me my life back. I am free because of you, Alexios, and that is immeasurable.”

It doesn’t feel that way for him, and he tells her so. He didn’t do any of this for her.

It doesn’t matter, Eritha replies. It is done. And now, the sun is setting and they have to leave.

She pulls two cloaks from a chest concealed behind the temple offerings and drapes one around him, fastening its pin and straightening its folds to conceal his sword, tugging the hood so that it sits low on his brow. Then she does the same for herself, the heavy wool engulfing her slight frame, and just like that they are no longer the High Priestess and her mysterious ward, but simply another nameless, faceless couple making pilgrimage to the sacred birthplace of Aphrodite.

His wounds, he quickly realizes, though no longer life-threatening, are far from fully healed; every step he takes sends a twinge of pain through his core, and he has to lean heavily on his companion as they make their way down the rocky hill. He stumbles more than once on the hilly footpath they take, but when she asks if he wants to rest, just for a moment, just to catch his breath, he grits his teeth and shakes his head.

“There is also the matter of the many allies my sister had under her thrall,” Eritha tells him as they walk, and he is grateful for her steady voice—for something to help take his mind off how fucking _weak_ his body has become. “I don’t think most of them even knew what it was they were really doing when she employed them to run her various errands, besides the simple fact that it would make her happy. In killing her, you freed them, too. It will take them some time to wake from her enchantment, I imagine, but the important thing is that they _will_ wake now. Thanks to you.”

“I thought I loved her, once,” he says softly. “Your sister. She dedicated her life to Aphrodite, even if only as a sham, and so I figured she would know better than I what it meant to love another. I gave myself to her in every way she wanted, but she never did the same for me.”

“You are not alone in that, I would image,” says Eritha. “And I am so very, very sorry.”

He sighs. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“Do you want it to matter?”

He thinks about it, then shakes his head. He wants to forget every fucking moment he ever spent on this fucking island.

“Why not just let me die?” he asks. “My body next to Diona’s would have answered a lot of the questions people are bound to be asking now. Especially those who fancied themselves close to her.”

“For all intents and purposes, Alexios, you _are_ dead,” Eritha responds. “At least, that is the story my allies have been sowing in the streets and beyond: that I found a strange man dying beside the broken body of my dear sister, and brought him up to the temple to face the wrath of our goddess herself before he perished.”

He shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m asking,” he says. “You saw that I killed your sister. You saw that I was dying. I’m asking you why you decided to save my life.”

 _I came here to die_ , he thinks. _What right did you have to take that from me?_

“Because she used you, too,” she responds. “And because you ended my nightmare, and I thought it would make us even: a life for a life. A priestess of Aphrodite should be indebted to no man.”

There is something she is not saying, but that is alright. Whatever she wants from him, he will find out. He always finds out.

“You sound like my sister,” he tells her with a furtive smile.

“Oh? Is she a priestess, too?”

“No,” he says, laughing. “No, she most certainly is not.”

 _She doesn’t want you_ , hisses a voice in his head that smothers his mirth like mud over a campfire. _She wants her brother, and you haven’t been that since you were six months old._

“I was blinded for a long time by the same hatred that drove Diona to do the things she did,” he tells Eritha. “I think you must already know that, if you knew of our relationship and our… mutual acquaintances. But what you couldn’t have known is how much and how often I have hurt my sister. I lashed out at her, then mocked her efforts at reconciliation. I spun the most elaborate lies in my head to convince myself that she was in the wrong, but she never was. She was good to me, just as you have been good to me, and I paid back every scrap of kindness she ever showed me with more strife.”

She watched him kill Perikles. She watched him kill her Spartan general. And yet, somehow, she still bears him no ill will.

_He would have seen a light in you, too, if only I’d taken the time to explain to him who you were to me._

It doesn’t make any fucking sense.

“If Diona had come to you to beg your forgiveness,” he asks, “would you have granted it?”

Eritha hesitates, fidgeting with the seam of her cloak, then shakes her head. “I’ve fallen for that trick many times, but she hurt me far too deeply, and for far too long. A snake may shed its skin, but the scales underneath are still the same.”

He nods and picks up his pace, doing his best to ignore the pain shooting through his sides, and she must sense the despair rising in him because she scrambles to catch up, to grab his elbow with a steadying hand as he stumbles in the growing dusk. And says:

“You are not a snake, Alexios. You may have been blinded for a time by whatever rage once consumed you, but Diona wasn’t. She chose to see the world with clear, hateful eyes. There was never any shred of goodness or compassion in her, but I don’t think the same of you.”

He is so very tired of people telling him what is or isn’t inside of him, for the truth of the matter is: there is nothing there. No hatred. No rage. They bled out of him along with the monster Diona killed, and their absence is gaping and black as pitch.

“I killed your own sister with my bare fucking hands,” he says, turning on her. “I shared her bed for years before that. I aided in her plots against you. You have every reason to want me dead, so tell me why the fuck I’m still alive.”

 _Tell me I’m a monster,_ he thinks. _Tell me I’m a rabid creature, a walking sin, a stain of filth and evil upon the earth. Tell me you were mistaken in letting me live._

_I came to Kythera to die. Tell me that I wasn’t wrong to want that._

_I am so tired of being wrong._

When Eritha speaks, her voice is soft but unwavering.

“You woke often, that first night,” she tells him. “The poison and the blood loss made you delirious and I doubt you remember any of it. You grabbed my wrist, like so—” she reaches a hand up and places it over his, “—and looked at me with tears in your eyes, and would not let me go. You begged me to bring you outside to see the stars, to tell you stories one last time. You called me Kassandra, and begged me to let you die. To kill you myself, and end your misery.”

He snatches his hand away, as if the sound of his sister’s name on her lips has scalded him.

“You’re lying.” His voice comes out a whisper. Even beneath his woolen cloak, he feels so very cold.

“Why would I lie about that?”

“I never asked you to save my life,” he says.

“You didn’t have to, Alexios. Is that so hard to believe?”

 _Of course it is!_ he would shout if he were not so fucking tired. _How could it not be?_

“You don’t know the things I’ve done,” he tells her. “If you did, you would not have hesitated to finish what your sister started. You don’t know a fucking thing about me.”

“I know that you are hurting deeply,” Eritha replies. “I know you have regrets that are weighing you down like stones in the pockets of a drowning man, and more scars than just the ones I’ve seen on your body. I know there is somebody named Kassandra whom you hold so dear, you cried out for her in your sleep every night. That is enough for me to know that it was not your time to go.”

She reaches for his hand, but he flinches back; if she touches him now, he thinks he might shatter completely.

“You can hate me all you want, Alexios,” Eritha says, “but it is done. You saved my life and set me free, and so I did the same for you. And I would do it again, happily and readily.”

She is lying, he tells himself. She is only helping him now because—because—

She is lying, screams a voice inside him, thin and desperate. She has to be. He doesn’t know why, but one way or another, he will find out. She will tell him what she wants from him, and the world will shift back to into an order he can recognize, because if she is not lying, then that means—

No.

People lie. The world is a cesspit of pain and horror. He is a monster. He knows these things to be true, because he has lived through it all. These are lessons that have been carved into his flesh and deeper, right here on this fucking island where his life has ended twice.

He is a monster. Life is suffering. Everybody lies. These are the foundation upon which his entire world has been built, and he knows them as intimately as he knows his own na—

But he does not know his name. He was a monster once, but the monster is dead, and he does not know what he is anymore. He does not know what is true, or right, or good, because all the things he thought he knew crumbled away at the touch of his sister’s broken spear.

All he knows is his sister, and suddenly it occurs to him that he never told Eritha her name.

When Eritha extends her hand again, he takes it, not trusting himself to speak.

“We’re almost there,” is all she says.

_When a snake bites you, you don’t just lie down and resign yourself to suffering a slow and painful death. You tie off the wound and drain out the venom to let yourself heal._

He wonders if there will ever come a day when he will grow accustomed to the feeling of all that venom draining from his heart. When he will learn to resist his impulse to cling to it, just so he knows there’s something— _anything_ in there. Anything but that cold and bitter void it has left behind.

He misses his sister.

The little fishing boat waiting for them in the harbor is sturdy but innocuous. Eritha helps him climb aboard, pointing out where his armor is tucked away inside a little chest along with clean bandages, a crate of food, and some casks of fresh water for his journey. He looks upon her altruism with a lump in his throat, and hasn’t the faintest clue how to begin saying everything he needs to say.

 _Let me stay_ , he wants to tell her, despite every fiber of his being itching to go. To put this fucking island behind him once and for all. To find his sister, and make things right.

_Diona is dead, but the nightmare is not yet over._

_Let me stay, so I can keep it from reaching you._

But he is of no use to Eritha at the moment, injured as he is, and she is right: his presence on her island, for the time being, will harm matters more than it will help them.

“When word of what happened here gets out,” he says instead, looking her in the eye to make sure she understands every word, “the Cult of Kosmos may come searching for answers. Searching for me. My sister and I may not return in time to lead them away from you.”

Eritha shrugs, half a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, and kneels down so that she is level with him. “I’m just a simple priestess, mourning the untimely death of my beloved sister, and I threw her killer’s body into the sea. They will find nothing of you here but the stains of blood on the floor of her bedchambers where she dragged you with her down to Hades.”

“If they press you for answers,” he tells her, “do not fight. Do not make them your enemy. Give them what they want, and do everything they ask. Tell them… tell them I took you hostage and forced you to aid me in my escape. Tell them you saw me sail northeast, for the Obsidian Is—”

“Stop.” Eritha places a hand on his arm. “The less I know, the less I can tell. You saved my life, Alexios; I will not turn my back on that. I’ve had quite enough of hiding, I think, to last a lifetime.”

“Eritha,” he warns.

She clasps both his hands in hers. “You have a good heart, Alexios,” she says. “To whatever extent you believe it now, know that you’ll always have a friend in me, and allies on Kythera. We are free now, because of you.”

“Eritha,” he says quietly. “Be careful. Please. Be safe. And thank you. For—”

 _I came here to die_ , he thinks, _but you didn’t let me. I am broken, but I am healing._

“Thank you for everything.”

_I am alive, Eritha. Because of you._

She gives his hands a squeeze and smiles that warm, sunny smile so unlike her sister’s. He unties the rope that’s tethering the boat in place, and she helps him push off. The sky is streaked with clouds, the moon a slender crescent, but there is enough light to illuminate the outline of the Peloponnese to the north, its snow-capped mountains truer than any lodestar.

When he finally glances back, all he sees of Kythera is the Temple of Aphrodite on the northern hill, doors unlocked, resplendent in the moonlight.

 

———

 

His little fishing boat is well-made, strong and swift as it cuts across the undulating surface of Poseidon’s domain. For three days he works the rudder and sail, steering north, then east, hugging coastlines where he can and coming ashore only to make camp under the stars. Slowly, his wounds continue to heal, the pain lessening and lessening the longer he is at sea.

There is much to consider while he makes his journey, and for once he finds the solitude peaceful. He is alone again, but not adrift; he knows where he wants to go, and when his mind wanders, it is not to ugly, brutal things. Something dark inside him has gone away, and its absence is cavernous and daunting. But it’s also exhilarating.

He supposes that’s what freedom is.

He thinks about throwing his armor into the sea, the last vestiges of a nightmare that has kept him shackled for far too long. But it’s good armor, finely crafted, and it fits him like a glove. He’ll keep it for now, he thinks, so long as the agents of Kosmos still draw breath. Let them behold him as they knew him, when he still thought himself their god. Let the gilded, gleaming lie they forced upon his broken heart be the last thing they see before he and his sister cast them into Tartarus.

If she even wants him back, that is.

 _She wants a brother_ , says a voice in his mind. _Not a monster._

But he is not a monster anymore. He doesn’t know what that makes him now, but perhaps it’s enough to know one more thing he _isn’t_. Perhaps she’ll be willing to meet him halfway.

Perhaps.

Hope is a funny thing. It clings to him, like memories of a dream he’d thought long forgotten, and doesn’t seem to want to go away.

In time, perhaps he can figure out what to do with it.

After four days at sea, as the sun sinks low in the west, a man who is not a god and not a monster steps onto the shores of Melos Island and drinks in the sight of the still-beached _Adrestia_ and her bustling crew like a wayward pilgrim beholding sanctuary.

Trepidation dogs his steps as he makes his way towards his sister’s campsite. He spots her a split second before she turns, as if she has sensed his presence, and her expression as she beholds him is unreadable. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out. There are things he needs to tell her. There are things he is terrified to hear in response, and he will not know what to do with himself if she says them.

I’m sorry. Let me stay. (Fuck off. Leave.) I’m sorry. (I hate you.) I love you. I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry. (You hurt me. Again. You always hurt me.) I’m sorry. I’ll be good. Please let me stay. I’ll be good. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

I’m sorry.

Beneath the heavy wool of his traveler’s cloak, he suddenly feels very young and small.

Then her arms are around his shoulders, and she is hugging him so tightly his still-healing wounds ache in protest, but he hardly feels it because she is laughing. His sister is laughing, and he is safe, and his arms come up to return her embrace, and she is full of strength, and warmth, and joy, and at last Alexios is home.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's for all you Kassidas shippers who have stuck with me through this fic, even though he's been super dead the whole time. I love you all!!!

**vii.**

 

“Look,” says Brasidas, eyes twinkling merrily as he shows her the lump of driftwood he’s finished carving. His fingers are cold where they brush against hers. “It’s Ikaros.”

Kassandra takes the little figurine from him with a frown. Save for the two flaps jutting out on either end that could charitably be called wings, it looks nothing like her eagle.

“I’m not very good yet,” he admits, a sheepish smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Although I suppose I’ll have the rest of eternity to improve. And they say a dead man can’t learn new tricks.”

“What the fuck are you still doing here?” she asks.

His smile does not fade, but when he speaks his voice is sad and weary:

“I came to say goodbye.”

And only then does she notice: though they are still sitting before a campfire, as they always are, it is not the ash-black sands of Melos beneath their feet but grass, soft and green. It is not sea-breeze she is smelling, but the nectar of wildflowers; not ocean waves lapping at the shore nearby, but the gentle flowing of a river.

Lakonia. They are in the lush valleys of Lakonia, and there is a little fishing boat sitting on the mist-shrouded banks of the Eurotas, manned by a figure who stands at its stern, hooded and silent. Ready. Waiting.

“Great,” Kassandra says, rising to her feet and walking away—away from the campfire, away from the riverbank. Away from him. There is a lump in her throat that she does not care for, and it makes her words come out clipped. “Goodbye.”

“You’re angry with me,” Brasidas says, following her.

“You’ve noticed, have you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care.”

“Kassandra, wait—”

“Just go, Brasidas.” She turns and hurls the little wooden eagle at his chest. He catches it, cradling it in the palm of his hand like a delicate thing. “Leave. Drink of the Lethe and enter Elysium, as you should have done weeks ago.”

“No.” His voice is soft, but firm.

_“What?”_

“I will go, but I won’t drink. There is nothing I cherish more than every moment I ever spent with you, Kassandra. If I must forsake those memories in order to enter Elysium, then that is not a paradise I want any part of.”

Her lip curls. “Perhaps you should have thought of that before you went and fucking died.”

“You’re right.” Brasidas sighs. “And I am so, so sorry. And I won’t leave you until I’ve made things right between us.”

“You already left me,” she snaps. “Weeks ago. The moment you locked eyes with that thing that used to live inside my brother and chose to fight him a second time, you were lost. So just fucking go.”

“Is that what you want?”

It’s a simple question, but one she cannot answer. Rage flares in her once again, ragged and wild like a fire roaring through a forest.

“I wanted you alive!” she yells, shoving him backwards. “I wanted you safe, and warm, and smiling next to me! I wanted to lay in your arms with my head on your chest, night after night, and let your heartbeat lull me to sleep! I wanted—I wanted a life with you, Brasidas!”

It’s the first time she’s admitted to the latter: to that mad, naive hope she has always kept locked away, for a partnership that could be measured in more than espionage and battle. For a future built on something sturdier than just those stolen moments, secreted away in safe-houses and war-tents, in the shadows of Arkadia and Pylos and fucking Amphipolis, when their enemies slept and they could let themselves say, _just tonight. We will claim this one night for ourselves, for we don’t know when the Fates will allow us another._ But here and now, in her dreams, before a man who took half her heart with him to his early grave, she sees no reason to hold back. What more could she lose?

He left her. She loved him, and he left her.

“Do you know what I got instead?” she asks him, voice trembling—with rage or with grief, she cannot tell. Perhaps a bit of both. Perhaps they are one and the same. “I got to close your dead eyes and wash the blood from your body and stitch your fucking throat shut so that your men could burn you on the same fucking beach where I watched my little brother kill you with your own fucking spear. Then I got to watch them carry your shield and your spear and your ashes back to Sparta on their triremes and bury you there with the rest of their cold, dead heroes. And while your countrymen spin tales of your feats to their sons and daughters and raise you into legend, all _I_ am left with is your ghost in my dreams, and the feeling of your drying blood still coating my fucking hands.”

Her breaths come harsh and stilted now, her chest heaving beneath the weight of the walls she can’t seem to stop building around her heart. Beneath the hurt, and the guilt, and that horrible, gnawing whisper of _not enough not enough not enough_ , and she cannot move.

He left her. She loved him, and he left her.

She would have hardly noticed the tears if he didn’t close the gap between them then, brushing away the wetness on her cheeks with a cold, dead thumb. She makes to slap his hand away but he catches her wrist, guiding it gently to his cheek, cold and dead and marred by that single slash that she once loved to trace absently with her fingers as he smiled at her, his warmth a gentle sunbeam in their stolen moonlight.

He presses his lips—cold, so cold—to her open palm, and she sinks to her knees with a strangled sob.

“I heard you scream,” he says softly, kneeling beside her and taking her hands in his. He’s still holding his stupid driftwood eagle, and he presses it into the palm of her hand and closes her fingers around it while she sobs, her face buried in his shoulder. “Just before the darkness claimed me. That is one sound I could stand to forget.”

She doesn’t remember screaming.

“Will you forgive me, Kassandra?” he whispers. “For the pain I have been causing you; for not knowing or understanding how much I was taking from you until it was too late. I never meant for things to happen the way they did. Do you believe me?”

But it was never a question of belief, or intention—though she suspects he knows that already. She nods anyway, if only so she might feel the warmth of his smile once more. She figures that isn’t too much to ask, after everything. It’s so fucking cold here.

“You knew, didn’t you?” she asks, sitting back on her heels and swiping at her eyes. “About the one they liked to call Deimos. Who he was to me, once. Who I hoped he could be again. I never told you in so many words, but you were a spy before you were a general, and you knew all along.”

Brasidas nods. “Your mother told me, on the road to Arkadia. She begged me to spare his life if our paths ever crossed. In my foolishness I told her I didn’t think it was likely it would ever come to that.”

“Still,” insists Kassandra, “I should have told you everything. I—I thought I could spare you; that your ignorance on the matter might somehow remove the target from your back.”

“He was killing my men, Kassandra. Helots who entrusted me with their lives and their futures. Spartiates I’d fought beside since we were boys in the _agoge_. Who had bled for me, and whom I’d bled for. I was fighting for my family, as you were for yours. Nothing would have stopped me from confronting your brother that day.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“There was no time. After the disaster at Pylos, the other polemarchs wanted him dead, do you understand? They tried putting up a bounty, but he slew each and every mercenary who came for him. By the time we marched on Makedonia, they would have mounted his head on one of their pikes to wave like a battle-pennant if they could. So I thought: if I could reach him before they did, engage him a second time—”

“You could what?” Kassandra snorts, but finds no humor in it. “Talk him down from the murderous rampage his captors dangled before him, like bait before a starving beast?”

“Neutralize him. Take him hostage. Use him as a bargaining chip to force a cease-fire between Sparta and Athens—nominally, of course. And quietly cut his bonds, and slip him home to you.”

“Ever the optimist.” Kassandra sighs, shaking her head. “You’re a fucking idiot, Brasidas.”

Brasidas laughs. “I’ve been called worse. Your mother had a few choice words for me when I opposed her desire to see Lagos killed.”

“I remember.” And even through all her hurt, Kassandra finds herself grinning. “She admitted to me—much later, after they buried you—that you were always in the right to spare his life. She’s always held you in high esteem, you know; she just has a habit of wearing her fury like a badge of honor.”

“A family trait, I presume,” Brasidas remarks, and it is Kassandra’s turn to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be.”

He brings a hand up to cup her cheek and leans in for a kiss, but she pulls back. The stab of guilt when she meets his sad, puzzled eyes burns even colder than his touch.

“I—I met a woman,” she whispers, “a warrior as fierce as any seasoned soldier. She makes me laugh, and makes me brave. She is teaching me how to live again. How to love again.”

She searches his face for any sign of hurt or betrayal, but finds only her sorrow mirrored back at her, mourning for what they could have been—and a small, firm nod of what can only be acceptance. So, she continues:

“Alexios came home. We found him up on Mount Taygetos, my mother and I, and he let us bring him home. He has endured so much more than you or I could ever begin to fathom, Brasidas, but he is himself again—or he is trying to be. He is trying so hard. And so am I.”

“You are happy,” he says softly. “With them.”

She nods, reaching for his hand. “Gods help me, it feels like the worst sort of betrayal.”

“Why?”

“I saw a little of Amphipolis, before we marched into battle,” she says. “It’s a beautiful settlement in a beautiful, wild land, and one day it will no doubt be a great city, the gateway into our corner of the world. And I would tear it all down, stone by stone, this city built on your blood, in exchange for your life. If it prolonged the war another decade, then so be it, for at least I’d have you. But Roxana’s life? My brother’s freedom? I would never trade those for anything. Not even if I knew such a sacrifice would bring you back to me.”

“And I wouldn’t want you to,” Brasidas replies. A single tear rolls down his cheek and drops like ice into her palm, and he brushes it away with a calloused thumb. “I cannot linger in your dreams forever, Kassandra. I cannot fight beside you, or sit with you by the campfire, drinking wine and swapping tales. I cannot keep you warm at night, or hold you as you fall asleep, or wake in the morning with you by my side. Cherish who you have now, and let me go.”

And despite his smile, despite the cold, chaste kiss he presses to her knuckles, he sounds so very, very tired.

Silently, she lets him take her hand—her hand still clutching that little figurine of Ikaros—and lead her back down to the riverbank, still shrouded in that heavy mist. The ferryman rises from his seat at the stern, silent and waiting, but Brasidas pauses before he boards the boat.

“I must confess,” he says, chuckling to himself and rubbing a hand on the back of his neck, “all these weeks I’ve lingered here, hoping to speak with you one final time. And yet in this moment I still have no idea what to say.”

“I’ll see you again, Brasidas,” Kassandra tells him, and her voice comes out far stronger than she truthfully feels. She folds his fingers around his driftwood eagle with a shaky grin. “You’ll probably be a much better woodworker by then.”

He laughs, loud and merry. “Then you had better not join me for a long, long while.”

A thought comes to her then, and she wonders why she hadn’t thought to voice it sooner:

“There’s a little girl across the river,” she says. “Her name was—is—Phoibe. Athenian by birth, though she lived with me on Kephallonia awhile before making it back to Attika. She wears her hair knotted tight, and she is quick to smile, quick to laugh. A skinny little thing who can’t sit still; twelve years old, I think; thirteen at most. She might have a friend named Kynna with her, and a little wooden eagle she likes to make-believe is real.”

“Better than mine, I’d hope.”

Kassandra laughs. “If you see her, would you tell her—”

_Tell her I miss her every day. That there is a hole in the world that holds her shape, and nothing will ever fill it but the memory of her laughter. Tell her I loved her more than anything, and that I am so, so sorry for failing her when she needed me the most._

No more walls, she thinks, blinking away the sudden burning in her eyes and drawing a steadying breath. Not anymore.

Be joyous like Phoibe. Be good like Brasidas. Be fierce like Roxana. Be brave like Alexios.

“Tell her—”

But it’s so fucking hard.

“I will tell her you did everything you could to save her,” Brasidas says gently. “That you still think of her often, and fondly, and that you strive to continue filling the world with her light. I will tell her you still love her very much, for even death is cowed before that fierceness in your heart. I suspect she will know all this already, because she knows you, but I will tell her all the same.”

Kassandra kisses him.

His lips are like ice on hers but they are soft and his beard tickles her just the way she remembers. She holds him close and presses a hand to his chest, as if she could somehow instill him with her warmth, her life, and will his heart to beat once more.

“They’re drawing up a treaty, you know,” she tells him. He will like knowing this, she thinks. If this is the last he hears of the world of the living, then let it be good news. “Athens and Sparta. There are skirmishes happening yet, but they are growing fewer and fewer. All throughout the land, people are laying down their weapons and raising their winecups to peace, telling one another of how Brasidas of Sparta and his army of helots liberated Makedonia and ended the unendable war. They sing of your strength. Your shrewdness of strategy. Your valor in battle.”

He raises an eyebrow. “But that is not how you remember me.”

_Do not forget,_ his eyes seem to say, even as his face remains politely curious. _We were allies before we were friends, and friends before we were lovers. I have always been able to tell when there are things you do not say, as you have always done for me._

So she tells him.

“I remember those things, and more.” She runs a hand down the side of his jaw, fingers grazing the roughness of his beard. “I remember a good man. A man who was kind and patient and utterly selfless. A man who fought with the courage of a thousand lions and the ferocity of a thousand wolves, but always with love in his heart. Who sought the light in every darkness, and in so doing left the world a kinder, more illuminated place than it was the day he was born.”

Brasidas nods, that gentle sunbeam-smile she loves so much spreading across his face. And perhaps it is just her imagination, but the stale, mist-dense air around them starts to feel just the slightest bit warmer.

“Whatever I did or didn’t do,” he says, “it only happened because I was fortunate enough to have you by my side a little while. I don’t care what the world remembers of me, Kassandra. Only you.”

She kisses him again, fierce and lingering, with everything she has. Her hands come up to cup his face, to wipe away the tear-tracks she’s left on his bloodless cheeks, and though his arms are dead and cold, his embrace feels just as much a shelter for her now as it ever was in life. He presses his lips to the top of her head and holds her tight, one last time.

Then he turns, tall and proud, and steps onto the boat. She watches him take the _drachmae_ from the pouch of his waistband and hand it to the ferryman, watches the boat push off from the bank and glide downstream, spiriting him into deeper waters where she cannot yet follow. And the mist swirls in, thick and cold and heavy, and the flowing of the river gives way to lapping waves, the perfume of wildflowers ceding to breeze and brine, and she wakes in her tent on the warm black beaches of Melos, cheeks damp with tears, clutching in her hand a small, jagged piece of uncarved driftwood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand... just one more chapter after this to finish off this story! AAAAAAAAHHHH


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for indulging me and coming on this weird, wild journey with me! It's ironic that, after so many words poured into this fic, I'm coming up empty when trying to describe just how much your words of encouragement and shared love for these disaster siblings have meant to me. So, from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you. And... enjoy! <333

**viii.**

 

The _Adrestia_ , freshly repaired, will sail at dawn; her crew, exhausted from a fortnight of painstaking labor but exuberant at the prospect of taking to sea once more, sacrifice a bull to Poseidon and dine well on beef and wine, making merry well into the night.

Five days he’s been back now, Alexios notices, and the crew seem less wary of him than ever before. They’d let him assist with hull repairs the very same afternoon he returned, then chided him gently when he overworked himself and tore a stitch in his side. From then on they’d confined him to the medical tent, where Odessa allowed him to make himself useful by helping her tend to those still recovering from their injuries: changing splints and bandages, making and administering medicine, cleaning tools. Simple tasks to keep his hands busy and his mind quiet.

It feels good to be useful.

Five days he’s been back, and he and his sister have barely had a moment to speak with one another. She knows the Kytherian Cultist is dead, though he does not bore her with the sordid details. And he makes sure she knows that he thinks her participation in and subsequent dismantling of the Battle of the One Hundred Hands was the stupidest fucking thing she’s ever done. She’d simply laughed at that, as he knew she would, and since then he’s hardly seen her at all.

She is busy, he knows; she has taken to filling her days with hunting and fishing in order to keep everybody fed, usually with that new lieutenant, Roxana, or with others from the boarding party—but never with him. This, he tells himself, is because it would take a sadist or an exceptional idiot to drag someone with his wounds out boar-hunting, and Kassandra is neither of those things. She’d seen for herself, his second morning back, the extent of his injuries—had come to smear some smelly ointment over her own cuts and bruises that she’d sustained from the Battle, just as Odessa was helping him change his bandages, and froze in her tracks.

_Please don’t be angry_ , he’d thought, heart hammering in his throat as her eyes flitted through a thousand emotions in a single instant. _Please, please, please don’t be angry._

But she’d simply covered her—shock? horror? pity?—with a quick smile and told him she was glad he was back. And he knows, now, that there is nothing ulterior to her sincerity—that there never has been, despite every feral instinct that has ever falsely warned him otherwise. Still, he cannot shake the feeling that she is just as at a loss for how to be around him as he is with her. They tried once, after all, and failed.

Perhaps it is enough to simply be close by. He can be content with that.

So it comes as somewhat of a surprise, though a pleasant one, when he is sitting awake on watch long after the rest of the crew have turned in for the night, to hear her now-familiar gait crunching softly towards him through the sand.

“I thought you had a reputation as a deadly assassin,” he teases, but doesn’t tear his gaze away from the sky. It’s a blessedly clear night, and the stars are out in full force. “Don’t you need to tread silently for that kind of thing?”

“Yes, but I’m not trying to kill you now, am I?” replies Kassandra. She nudges his shoulder. “Move over.”

“You have plenty of room,” he grumbles, but makes space for her by his side anyway. She seats herself on his unused bedroll, drawing his furs around her bare legs and warming her hands over his little campfire.

“You didn’t sleep much as a baby, either,” she remarks. “I guess some things never change.”

“Well I don’t shit myself anymore, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he mutters. “So why are _you_ awake?”

But she just shrugs, turning over a little lump of driftwood in her hand. In the flickering firelight he sees that her eyes are rimmed with red. Alexios sighs. There are many things about his sister that he does not yet understand. But this? This he understands all too well.

He shifts his weight, wincing a little when the movement tugs at a tender place in his side that is still healing, and does not miss the way her eyes narrow immediately. To his relief, she says nothing.

So this is how things will be. She will not ask him about what happened with Diona, and he will not ask her about her dead Spartan general; some things, they seem to have tacitly agreed, should stay where they are buried. Not because they are secrets to be suppressed in remorse or shame, but because leaving them behind is the only way to move forward.

Someday, perhaps, they will find the words to speak of the things that keep them awake long into the night. Or perhaps they won’t. He is happy to be by his sister’s side either way.

“Will you forgive me, Alexios?” Kassandra asks, so quietly he can barely hear over the crackling of the fire.

It is the last thing he is expecting to hear, and he looks at her as if she’s sprouted a second head. “For what?”

“For pushing you away the way I did,” she says. “There is an anger inside of me, and it is what has kept me alive and driven all these years, but all too often I let it get the better of me. I forget how much it hurts to be on its receiving end, and I am so, so sorry for laying that hurt on you.”

“It’s alright,” he tells her. “I know that anger all too well. I know how much it loves to take, to destroy anything and everything in its path. How it eats you alive, and blinds you so that you can’t even see yourself festering beneath it until it’s too late. And when the rage finally burns itself out, I know the emptiness that it leaves behind. The desolation. There is nothing to forgive, Kassandra.”

“Still,” she protests. “I—”

“Stop.” He sighs. “Just… let it go. Please.”

She holds his gaze for a long moment. _Please don’t be angry_ , he thinks. Then, finally, shakily, she relents.

“All I want is to be your sister,” she says, “but I don’t know how. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I always seem to end up failing you.”

_No!_ he wants to shout. Wants to grab her and shake her and shout, over and over until she finally understands: _You are not at fault for what I became, the things I have done. You have never been at fault for any of it._

But all that slips out is: “Are you fucking stupid?”

It’s not at all what he meant to say, but it does shock his sister into silence. So… that’s something.

“Do you know why I went up to Mount Taygetos again?” he asks, but continues on before she can say a word. “The Cult was through with me. It was their own fault, really; if you do nothing but lash a captive beast, eventually the lashes lose their effectiveness in reining it in. I challenged too many of the Sages, acted too often of my own accord. Even before Kleon’s arrow pierced my back, I knew: I’d outlived my use to them. And what’s another corpse amid the foundations of Amphipolis?”

“They threw you away,” Kassandra whispers. “Just like they tried to convince you _we_ did, all those years ago. They taught you to hate it, to fear it more than anything, and then they forced it on you anyway.”

Alexios nods. “And so I ran. I ran as far from that beach as I could, and when I found myself in Lakonia, I realized that I wanted to see the place where my life had ended the first time. I knew you would find me there, sooner or later. And so I resolved to deliver them your head, and force them to need me once more. Or, if I could make any final choice for myself, and only myself, I wanted you to be the one who dealt me the killing blow.

“Don’t you see?” he says. “I did everything I could to goad you into killing me, but instead you brought me home. You are my sister, Kassandra; you have never once failed me. _Never._ Despite all the lies that blinded me. Despite all the shit I’ve slung your way.”

His sister gives a watery chuckle. “We’ve tread through a lot of shit to get here, haven’t we?”

Alexios grins. “Mounds and mounds of it.”

It feels good to make his sister laugh. Perhaps that is the first step towards becoming siblings once more.

“It was worth it,” he adds quietly, and she nods in agreement.

She draws a small knife from her belt and starts to carve into her little chunk of driftwood, tossing scraps into the campfire as she whittles. Above their heads, her eagle chirps, circling lower.

“Hold out your arm,” she tells him, not looking up from her work.

“What?”

“Ikaros is tired,” she says, “and my hands are busy. Hold out your arm so he can land. And be careful with his claws.”

He has half a mind to remind her he’s had worse things than eagle talons rake his forearms, but thinks better of it and does as she asks. Her eagle circles lower, but does not land. He can feel those beady eyes trained on him.

“ _Ela_ , Ikaros, you priss.” Kassandra rolls her eyes, but can’t fight back a grin. “Either come rest, or don’t. Make up your damn mind.”

Ikaros lands. His talons bite into Alexios’ forearm, but do not break skin. They stare at one another while Kassandra continues whittling, not a care in the world.

Ikaros chirps again.

“He’s asking to have his belly rubbed,” she explains. “Like a cat.”

The last time he stopped to rub a cat’s belly, Chrysis had snatched it up and sliced it open, still writhing and mewling, on her altar while he screamed for her to stop, and then she turned her wrath on him.

Tentatively, he hovers his free hand a hair’s breadth from the soft feathers of his belly. Ikaros bucks his head forward with a loud squawk, and he snatches his hand away.

“ _Maláka!_ ” Kassandra drops her knife and wood in the sand and leans over, snapping her fingers at Ikaros. “Be nice!”

“You should take him,” Alexios says. “I don’t think he likes me.”

“Sure he does.” His sister smirks. “He just wants to make you work for it.”

And she takes his hand in hers, guiding it up and running the backs of his knuckles down the soft plumage of her eagle. When she lets go of his hand to give the top of Ikaros’ head a playful ruffle, he continues the same sweeping strokes on his own. Ikaros coos, leaning into their touch with his wings half-extended, luxuriating in all the attention he’s been given.

Alexios can’t help but smile.

Kassandra glances up at them every now and then as she works, and he realizes after some minutes that she’s carving an eagle. Or, rather, she is trying to carve something that vaguely resembles a creature with appendages akin to wings; Barnabas wasn’t joking when he’d said she was hopeless when it came to the finer details of woodcraft.

“Five days you’ve been back, Alexios,” she remarks a few minutes later, still carving, “and you’ve volunteered for watch duty for four of them.”

Alexios says nothing, just shifts around so that his arm is resting on his knee, the better to bear Ikaros’ weight, and continues to pet him.

“Alexios.” She re-sheaths her knife and slips the half-finished carving into the little pouch on her belt.

“What?”

“How long have you been awake?”

He shrugs. “Not as long as the longest I’ve been awake. I nap in the medical tent sometimes, when Gelon comes by to help out.”

It’s not an answer, and he knows it. There’s a spot just below Ikaros’ neck where he seems to particularly enjoy light scratches.

His sister shoots him a piercing glare that bears an uncanny resemblance to the look their mother gave him when he’d told Stentor someplace he might consider shoving his big fancy spear. He pauses. Disgruntled at the sudden lapse in pampering, Ikaros makes a clipped little chirp and takes off, settling on a nearby tent pole.

Alexios sighs, dropping his arm and running his fingers through the coarse black sand.

“Sometimes,” he admits quietly, “when I sleep, I see masks. White like corpses, frozen in leering grins, their faces streaked with blood. They—they whisper to me.”

“What do they say?” Kassandra asks. Then, immediately, “Sorry, you don’t have to—”

“The same as always,” he tells her. “Everything I want to hear, and everything I fear most. They know it all. They tell me I’m a god in human flesh, with a great destiny to fulfill: that I am the only one who can carry out the will of Kosmos and bring order to this broken world. They say you’ve been lying to me this whole time, because you only want to use me as a weapon, and you fear my power. That you’ve left me for dead twice before, and will do so again the moment it suits you. And they tell me… they tell me you don’t love me, because you are not my sister.”

“Alexios—”

“I know they’re lying,” he adds quickly. “The moment I wake, I see the lies for what they are. I know who _you_ are, and I know that you love me, and I know that I love you. But what happens when I wake from another night of ceaseless whispers, and the lies follow me into waking?”

It is so easy, he thinks, for the things he thinks he knows to fall away, and in the blink of an eye he will be lost again. The fear rakes his heart with its icy talons, unshed tears burning in his eyes. He is so tired, and he cannot lose himself a third time. Cannot endure another Taygetos, another Kythera. Will not.

His hands clench and unclench in the coarse sand. It hurts so much, he wants to tell her. The hatred and the lies, and the scars they’ve left behind. The jagged little fragments of himself that he’s piecing back together into a shape he cannot recognize, because he doesn’t know what it was supposed to look like to begin with. Doesn’t know how to hold it all together in a way that won’t shatter at the lightest touch, and slice his fingers through to the bone.

His sister takes his hand in both of hers, giving it a little squeeze before reaching up to thumb away the tears trickling down his cheeks.

“Look at me, Alexios,” she says softly, gently, but he cannot. He turns away, watching his other hand continue making fists in sand as black as night.

He wants to sleep. He wants to dream. He wants to remember the stories his sister told him when he was just a baby, healthy and whole and happy, before all the rage and all the lies and all the hurt shattered his heart and made the stars go black.

He is so fucking tired.

“Alexios,” Kassandra repeats. “Look at me— _look at me._ ”

It is the voice she uses when she is commanding her crew, quieter now in the darkest hour of the night while the world sleeps on around them, but the authority in her tone is unmistakable. His hand stills, and he looks up.

There is fire in his sister’s eyes, but—the realization hits him so suddenly that it takes his breath away—it is not rage, but love. There is a difference.

There is a difference.

“You will find your way back from this,” says Kassandra. It is not a request, nor is it a demand. She says it as if it is fact. As if the simple act of declaring it is all it takes to make it true.

“I lost you once when you were a baby,” she says, “and you found your way back to me. I lost you again when I stupidly pushed you away after that battle, and you found your way back to me. Do you trust me?”

Slowly, he nods. She reaches up and tucks a stray wisp of hair behind his ear, smoothing it with the palm of her hand.

“Then believe me when I tell you: whatever happens in the morning—whatever is in your head upon waking—you will find your way back. You always do. You are the strongest person I know, Alexios. The bravest person I know. You have survived more than I will ever begin to understand, so I know you will survive this, too. And I will be right by your side, as I should have been from the very start, to guide you home.”

Gods, but when she says it in that voice, he finds himself beginning to believe it, too. Her hand is warm as she takes his once more, giving it another reassuring squeeze, and in this moment he cannot fathom how he ever ridiculed his sister’s love, or questioned its sincerity, or thought it weak. It is one of the strongest and truest forces he has ever encountered. It is certainly the most stubborn.

“Why did they do this to us?” he asks her. “We were just children; we never hurt anybody.”

“Because they feared us.” Kassandra shrugs, as if it is something she has repeated to herself many, many times. “They feared our bloodline, the lineage of Leonidas. We are stronger than most, faster than most. By all accounts we should both be dead a hundred times over, but we can withstand more, and heal faster from our wounds. Every great lie contains a single grain of truth to make it all the more believable, and this is the truth at the heart of all their lies: we are special, somehow, and they fear us for it.”

But he knows this already. Of course he knows this. And if their lineage is special in some way, then so be it, for at least they have each other now. It is the hurt, the rage and the hatred and all those fucking lies that tore their lives to shreds before they even had a chance to begin— _that_ is what, after everything they have been through, he cannot comprehend.

“We were _children_ ,” he whispers.

But even as the words form themselves on his lips, he knows the truth: they never were.

“I know,” Kassandra murmurs, voice heavy with sorrow. “I know. I asked _mater_ the same questions, but she couldn’t answer them much better than I can. But she told me where I could find those answers. It terrified me then, Alexios, and it still terrifies me now: the implications of what our bloodline is capable of—what _we_ are capable of. But I am done running from it. Our enemies are motivated by fear and spite, and I will not have the same be said for me. _Mater_ mentioned a man on the island of Thera who may hold all the answers. I think we should seek him out.”

“Thera?” It is so unexpected, he almost laughs. “No one lives on Thera. It’s a volcanic wasteland.”

Kassandra shrugs. “I think we should see it for ourselves. Will you come with me?”

Yes, Alexios thinks. Of course he will. He would follow his sister to the ends of the earth. But—

“Not yet,” he says. “I will go with you, but we should go to Messara first.”

“What? Why?”

“Diona discovered the truth of my allegiances before she died,” he explains. “If she sent word out before she came to kill me, the first Cultist who would have received her message lives just outside the city of Kydonia. We have to reach him before he sends his agents to Kythera to investigate the one who helped me return to you. The least I owe her is to ensure her continued safety, after all she’s done for me.”

He will not speak more of it, but Kassandra knows already; she has seen at least the physical marks of what Diona did to him, and so she knows that he could not have made his way back on his own.

She nods. “Very well. Messara tomorrow, then Thera after. But for now, I need you to sleep. I’ll take over your watch.”

Alexios blinks in bewilderment. “But—”

“That’s an order, Alexios. I am your commander, and I order you to get some fucking sleep.”

“I’m your _brother_ ,” he protests.

Kassandra arches an eyebrow. “I’m older. Now lay down, or I will make you lay down.”

He scowls as he stretches out on his bedroll. “Eat shit, _maláka_ ,” he grumbles.

“What was that?”

“I said goodnight.”

He pretends to ignore the fond smile tugging at his sister’s lips as she smooths the furs over him; he fixes his gaze straight up instead, at the vaulted heavens and the stars that shine like jewels. His sister lies back as well, her head pillowed on his shoulder.

“You’re not supposed to fall asleep,” he says.

“I’m not asleep.”

“You will be.”

“No, I won’t.”

She reaches a hand up and over to shove him in the face. He shoves right back, grabbing her by the wrist and twisting backwards—but lightly, just enough to create the slightest pressure, to make her think twice about continuing to fuck with him.

“Do you want me to sleep,” he says, “or do you want me to kick your ass?”

Kassandra laughs. “You couldn’t kick my ass if you tried, little brother.” She taps his arm in concession.

“I could, too,” he mutters, but lets go of her wrist all the same.

His bedroll is more comfortable than he wants to admit, the furs soft and warm. The weight of his sister’s head on his shoulder is reassuring in a way he never knew such things could be reassuring.

He does not tell her any of this, because he knows she will just smirk and say she told him so.

“Do you know the story of Callisto and Arcas?” Kassandra asks, unbidden. “It was my favorite when I was little, but I don’t think _mater_ liked it very much. She said it made her sad that they had to be made into stars before they could truly be together. But… I don’t know, I guess I always thought it was sweet, too, in its own way. I must have told it to you a hundred times.”

Alexios hesitates, wracking his memory. A bear, he thinks. It’s a story about a bear. Or… two bears, perhaps?

He doesn’t know.

He knows gods; he thought he was one, once. And he knows prophecies: their weight, their shackles. He knows monsters. Knows what it is like to become one, to lose himself completely within that snarling rage. And he knows how it feels to have the monster bleed out and die inside him.

He knows those things, but he does not know stories.

“I don’t remember how it goes,” he admits. “I’m sorry.”

But his sister just grins. “If I tell it to you now, promise me you won’t tell _mater_?”

Alexios laughs. “I promise.”

She begins to tell it, reaching up to trace images in the stars as she does so. He watches her hands move, and he can hear the joy in her voice as she settles into the rhythm of the telling—can feel the warmth that permeates her every inflection and gesture, sinking beneath the softness of his furs and lighting a fire deep within his chest.

It’s love, he thinks. Not rage. There is a difference.

As she speaks, he sees the shapes of the story come to life in the stars—the same stars, he now realizes, that have been there since he was a baby. Steadfast and shining. Waiting, all these years, like beacons through the darkness to guide him home. All he has to do is follow their light.

He does not stay awake long enough to hear the end of the story.

She’ll just have to tell it again tomorrow.


End file.
